Misfits bench Febiven and add LIDER to starting lineup after loss

With a 2-3 standing, Misfits have not been having the best LEC Summer Split. A humiliating match against SK Gaming in which they lost in under 30 minutes seems to have pushed the coaching staff to make changes. 

The struggling team has decided to bench Nubar “Maxlore” Sarafian and Fabian “Febiven” Diepstraten. They will be replaced with Thomas “Kirei” Yuen and Adam “LIDER” Ilyasov, who are now on the starting lineup. 

Febiven has been playing League of Legends professionally since 2014, when he was signed with Cloud9 Eclipse. He had a great run with H2K Gaming, placing second in the EU Regionals Finals in 2017. But he hasn’t had similar results as part of Clutch Gaming in 2017, or with Misfits more recently. 

The 19-year-old LIDER has shown a lot of potential as a mid laner for Misfits’ Academy team. He has three MVP awards under his belt and a European Masters championship win this spring. While LIDER shined on the Academy team, it’s yet to be seen how he will perform against teams in the LEC, which includes an upcoming match against Schalke 04, also sitting at a 2-3 record. 

So far, Misfits’ two wins have been against Excel Esports and Rogue, the former of which has a 0-5 record in the summer split. While fans have continued to root for Misfits, the synergy problems they’ve been dealing with have shown in matches against stronger teams. In the spring split, Misfits placed eighth with only eight total wins. This are similar to their 2018 results, when they placed seventh in the spring split and fifth in the summer.