By quincy0191
The relative consistency of the other teams, however, means we can look at something else: which team matchups have been the most one-sided, and which have been the most even. Let’s start with the most one-sided matchups.
Most Lopsided Head-to-Head Record
The far right column represents the team in the far left column, so tree have won 85.7% of their games against Reason, which translates to a 6-1 record. A minimum of four games head-to-head was used to qualify for the list, which meant the teams must have played each other in at least two separate series or one non-sweep Grand Finals (which didn’t end up mattering here, of course).
SynC showing up three times here isn’t surprising, and in fact it’s more shocking that they don’t appear more often. The biggest culprit there is the fact that they always play the #2 seed from Gold, meaning they usually face the weakest team in the cycle, which is then promptly relegated for the next cycle. They just haven’t had repeated series against any team outside of tree, BMG, NR, and Rea. Three of those four teams appear here, and the SynC-BMG matchup is 6th at a 75% win for SynC.
Average game length is included here to give an idea of exactly how much each team stomped the other. Night Raid in particular are at a depressing 18 minutes in average game length against SynC; they haven’t just lost, they’ve been consistently obliterated. It seems like NR doesn’t get quite as much respect as they might deserve from the community, considering they have managed to stay in Diamond and consistently place in the middle of the bracket. It’s perhaps hard to tell who they really are: the team that can’t manage to hang on past 20 minutes against SynC, or the team that can beat the #2 team in willowkeeper and knock them out in Cycle 4.
Speaking of willowkeeper, they’ve managed a 6-1 record against Reason, but those have been a series of hard-fought matches. The two teams have faced each other three times, with one series going the distance, but tree has come out ahead every time (and of course knocked Reason down to Gold this weekend). They do scrim each other often, and word is that Reason is winning most of those matches, but when they come together in HoN Tour things apparently get turned around.
And of course I would be remiss to mention the fact that the fifth-most one-sided matchup is one of two that we’ve seen most often, tree-SynC (tree-BMG is also at 10 games). SynC have lost a couple matches against willowkeeper, but won eight others, and out of four series came out the victors each time.
Most Even Head-to-Head Record
Here we have four separate head-to-heads that have left each team even, and tree is on three of them. They’ve split the series against BMG, NR, and Dawn, with the last two getting evened up this past weekend. willowkeeper had a surprising third-place finish in Cycle 1, then an even more surprising second-place finish in Cycle 2, and then we got used to them in Cycle 3. But their early exit from Cycle 4 and a somewhat messy Cycle 1 means that against these three teams, they haven’t exactly played like gangbusters. It’s really been their dominance of Reason and 2-0 wins against Nullstone, REXXARS, and Twisted Fusion that have kept them from being a middle-of-the-pack team. That might sound dismissive, but beating teams you’re supposed to beat is a big part of being a top team; for evidence of that, just look at the first weekend of Cycle 4.
These series haven’t just been a case of one team getting hot at the other team turning it around some weeks later, however. Four of the five are in the top five average game lengths, with BMG-tree the only one to fall outside of it (and tree-Rea taking the #2 spot). These series have consistently produced not only even results but generally very close and hard-fought games. Nobody’s getting destroyed here, it’s often a case of evenly matched teams displaying how close they are to each other.
Null-Rea is probably the best example of that, as they average not only the longest games in this table, but the longest average series length. The teams are #1 and #2 in terms of average game length overall as well, with Reason taking first place at 41.79 minutes and Nullstone coming second with 40.14 minutes. willowkeeper is an obvious third place as their games average 39.64 minutes, after which there’s a gap of more than three minutes to BMG in fourth (36.6). That might not seem like a big discrepancy, but it’s a larger divide than anything until we get to SynC (10th place, 32.1) and then Twisted Fusion (11th place, 26.98).
Two things stand out based on these tables: first, SynC is a very good team. What a revelation. I am glad I could bring you that shocking factoid. Second, it’s pretty astounding what one bad weekend can do to a team. willowkeeper were almost universally considered the #2 team in HoN, and before last weekend had plenty of numbers to back that up. Now they look almost mediocre, on the right side of one lopsided matchup and the wrong side of another, and appearing on three of the most even series. tree have to do what SynC does and not only beat the teams they should beat, but beat the teams that should also pose a challenge, as obvious as that sounds. Right now, they’re not doing that.
