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The Roar will be looking at all six playoff teams before their first match of the postseason and today, we’re looking at the third team on the ladder – the Boston Uprising.
The Uprising are an undoubtedly strong team, but they may need a little luck to be successful in these playoffs.
Boston Uprising were another team I wasn’t expecting to see in the finals. Their position is in part thanks to their incredible run in Stage 3, where they played undefeated until they were taken down by New York Excelsior in the final for that stage.
Other stages have seen less consistent play, with the most recent Stage 4 not seeing the team secure a win until the final two weeks.
Thankfully, they really picked up their performance and won the last four matches of the stage. That doesn’t seem very impressive when that fortnight included teams like the Florida Mayhem and Shanghai Dragons, but it did also see a decisive 3-1 comeback victory over top dogs NYXL.
Other matches throughout the league seem to swing back and forth, without much in the way of patterns to be found and it’s this that makes them a hard team to pin down.
Some of this is due to their almost polarising statistics on maps. The Uprising boast a nearly perfect win percentage Volskaya Industries and Temple of Anubis, but an incredibly low success rate on Hanamura.
All teams have maps they do and don’t like, but Boston seem to be a team particularly dependant on pulling their favourite maps rather than having too much to do with their opponent.
The current meta also doesn’t appear to weigh as much as it can do with other teams and, while it did seem to take them a while to adapt to the introduction of Brigitte, they seemed to have cleared that up.
Boston have slowly been improving their dive comp throughout the season as well and, with the extra time to train before the finals, probably have some nifty tricks up their sleeve.
They have also not been a team totally without controversy, with the removal of one of their star DPS players Jonathan “DreamKazper” Sanchez after horrifying allegations of sexual misconduct.
Nam-joo “Striker” Kwan and Stanislav “Mistakes” Danilov appear to have tactfully picked up the slack and we didn’t see the move have too much impact on their level of play.
With their reliance on maps to win it almost feels like luck of the draw for the Boston Uprising. Some of their best and worst maps feature in the playoffs, so they’re going to need to get lucky on the preassigned maps and then try to maintain a higher seed to have the opportunity to control what comes next.
Thankfully, the losing team from there on will pick the maps – giving a potentially-needed leg up to whoever has found themselves at a disadvantage. As long as Boston can start off on a good footing, faltering shouldn’t cost them too heavily.
The other upside to a map dependant team is that maps are one of the easiest things to prepare for.
They’ve known what’s in the pool for a while now so there has been plenty of time to practice and perhaps even surprise teams expecting an easy win.
The Supports.
Support players don’t get nearly enough love in the Overwatch League, but Boston Uprising has them in droves. When they dropped DreamKazper they didn’t even think to pick up another DPS and instead doubled down and grabbed themselves an extra support to complement their roster.
While usually a DPS player, Stanislav “Mistakes” Danilov has also recently moved to the support side by picking up the role of hybrid Brigitte when required. This means even more support in a meta which still may rely on some solid Brigitte play when needed.
Kristian “Kellex” Keller is a gold standard in the League, sitting in the top five for healing behind the supports of the Shanghai Dragons and New York Excelsior.
With Shanghai not appearing in the playoffs this makes him one of the top three healers we’ll see in the playoffs and the ability to swap out support players and keep things fresh will mean more survivability for everyone else.
With all this healing it’s going to be especially difficult to take out the Boston Uprising and this could give them the edge during the playoffs.