Hey, can you come by?” Brett asked. He was on the phone with Brad, standing in the kitchen of the apartment complex where he, Brad, and the team lived. When Brad arrived at Brett’s apartment, he entered without knocking. Having lived steps from each other for more than a year now, Shock had achieved a casual vibe, treating each other like family. Brett was finishing a cigarette on the patio, so Brad joined him outside.
“Hey man,” Brad said, “what’s up?”
Brett took a final drag and ground the cigarette out under his boot. He squared up with Brad.
“Look, we’re releasing you.”
Brad stood silent. Though Shock had destroyed their chances at the playoffs in the first half of the third stage, they had closed that stage by winning five of their last seven matches. They’d finished the stage with a 6–4 record. In fact, they missed the Stage 3 playoffs only because they had a worse map differential than Gladiators, the tiebreaker when two teams shared the same record. With Super and Sinatraa finally in the lineup and playing well, it seemed it was finally coming together.
“Okay,” Brad said, and went back to his apartment to tell his wife.
Brett needed to make a plan. He had sent the players to Santa Monica for the day to avoid anyone catching wind of the personnel move, because the new coach they were set to meet the next morning was that very day still coaching his old team in the Stage 3 playoffs. (That team would win in the first round of the playoffs but lose the Stage 3 championship match to the New York Excelsior, who solidified their status as the best team in the Overwatch League.) Including the four games to end Stage 2 and the first playoff game, the new coach of the San Francisco Shock had put together a fifteen-match win streak. It was astonishing that he was even available and even more astonishing that he chose the ninth-place San Francisco Shock as his next team. Six teams had offered him their head coaching job, with one owner literally getting down on his knees to beg him.
The next morning, the players crowded into the practice room, the full twelve-man roster they had assembled as well as the two assistant coaches, Harsha and JunkBuck, and two new, unfamiliar assistant coaches, plus Brett. I glanced at the chairs, realizing by the look a player gave me as I eyed the last one that it was standing room only for me. Sinatraa looked shaken. Dhak looked wary. Sleepy and Moth look uncharacteristically excited. Nevix looked exactly as he always did, solid.
The door opened, and in stepped a Korean man. He wore a solid blue sweatshirt over a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers.
“Hello, my name is Crusty. I’m from Boston Uprising,” he said. He spoke with a strong Korean accent, which meant a little trickiness with the r and a melodious rising and falling running through the sentences (Korean is a tonal language). He spoke forcefully and with confidence, like the Kool-Aid Man crashing through the language barrier. “I think this team have a great potential,” he said, chopping his right hand into his left palm in rhythm with his words. “That’s why I choose this team. And I believe in you guys, but I think there’s a little problem now.” At this, Crusty looked around the room, catching the eye of the players, one by one, seeming to want to confirm, from a look, that each agreed. They did. “I think you guys are doing better and better. I think next stage, you guys can go to title match. My opinion.” He looked up and took a step back, like he was finished. Then he raised a finger in the air. “Also, I want to be your friend,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to talk me. So, let’s make the best team, okay.” He said okay flatly, like it was a settled matter.
Everyone clapped, and Brett thanked the team for coming in on Monday, their off day, telling them they were free to go. He apologized for the secrecy around the new coach. “I think this is going to be a banger fucking stage,” he said. “So let’s get it.”
For most of the players, that meant back to their computers to check in on social media. There, they found the news was reported. Brett had tweeted it just before bringing Crusty in the door.
I started to sidle up to Sinatraa to get his opinion of the situation and quickly discovered that he didn’t want to talk to me or even acknowledge my presence. This was personal for him. He continued to sit in a chair alone, not talking to anyone. It wasn’t just that Sinatraa had spent the past eighteen months of his life under Brad’s wing, it was that the Stage 3 stats showed that he was a below-average Tracer player in OWL. In what was supposed to be his time to shine, instead another player, Striker, had come off the bench to claim the title of best Tracer in the league. Striker played for Boston, getting a shot to start only after DreamKazper was banned. It was as much due to Striker’s electric Tracer play as Crusty’s coaching that Boston had gone undefeated in Stage 3. That was supposed to be Sinatraa’s story. Instead, he was officially not good, and the coach who’d built the team around him was gone. With a new coach in town with no stake in his recruitment or decision to pay him $150,000, a coach rumored to prefer a whole Korean roster, would he be a starter anymore? And if he wasn’t starting, would he even be on the team next year?
Dhak wrinkled his nose as he considered the situation. Moth’s face was lit up, so I wondered what he thought. Was Crusty a good coach? “He’s one of the two best coaches in the world,” Moth said. “Him and Pavane, the NYXL coach.” After three stages of play, NYXL were first in the league, with twenty-seven wins out of thirty matches. Boston were second, with twenty-two wins. After going 5–5 in Stage 3, Spitfire were third, with twenty wins. Shock currently had twelve wins. They’d probably need seven wins to make the Stage 4 playoffs. If Crusty could keep his regular-season streak alive for ten more games, Shock had an outside chance of qualifying. Although not a great record, 22–18 could put them in the playoffs if everything broke right.
When Crusty took over, practice changed dramatically. Instead of having desks along each wall, they were arranged into pods. Navigating the practice room suddenly became a game of shimmying between desks roughly six inches apart. The lights were kept off far more often, meaning the only light came from computer screens or the big-screen TV on the wall. Crusty would play VODs on the TV, and then he would use Microsoft Paint to draw on his computer. For instance, he would replay a clip of the team attempting to take a point called “Shrine” on the map Nepal and showed the players how he wanted each of them positioned: using the two sets of columns on the map to protect the healers from opposing fire. Then, when the opposing team decided to come down the stairs to pounce on the healers, he crudely drew on the map in Microsoft Paint who should move where, so that it became a trap.
Under Crusty, the players began to receive ten-page printouts with notes on the prior day’s scrims. The printouts would include images to show when the individual player’s positioning was off, how opposing teams tended to group, suggestions for flanking angles, and so on. They were incredibly detailed, and Crusty and his team produced them five days a week. On days off, the coaches—Crusty; an assistant coach he brought with him from Boston, NineK; plus JunkBuck and Harsha, whom Crusty kept on board—would convene, usually at the practice room, to review other teams’ VODs, discuss the meta, or plan for the week. Crusty promoted Chris Chung, the team manager of NRG’s Contenders team, to team manager of Shock. Chris and Crusty were friends, and the high opinion that Chris held of Andy and Brett had been a factor in Crusty’s decision to choose them. Under Chris, schedules were planned much further in advance: no more of the one-day-at-a-time business. Players were encouraged to adopt a more normal sleep schedule. For the first time ever, I heard a coach ask a player what they typically ate on match days. It seemed that, as had happened in football and basketball decades ago and in baseball perhaps around the turn of the century, the professionalization of Overwatch had arrived.
Unlike those sports, however, with their years-long processes for changing minor rules, Overwatch continued to grapple with the challenges of keeping the game both fresh—by introducing new maps and characters—and balanced—by nerfing and buffing hero abilities—all while managing the fallout that resulted from those changes in a league with millions of dollars of prize money on the line.
Under Crusty, Shock lost their first match, once again to one of their California nemeses, this time the LA Gladiators, led by Fissure. Shock were just the first casualty of Fissure’s warpath to the playoffs. After three stages of the play, Gladiators were ranked seventh in the overall standings, out of playoff contention. Led by Fissure’s dominant tank play, Gladiators would go 9–1 in Stage 4, making the playoffs as the #4 seed.
Shock then beat the crumbling husk of Seoul Dynasty, the preseason favorite. Seoul, like Spitfire, suffered from too much talent on the roster creating a poor team environment. Ranked first in every preseason power ranking, Seoul finished eighth and missed the playoffs.
In their third match of Stage 4, Shock faced off with their old friends, Spitfire. Spitfire had won all three matches so far, though Shock now had Crusty. It wouldn’t be enough. Spitfire would remain undefeated against Shock in the first season. The score read Jack 4, Brett 1 (and the one, Sinatraa, had so far been a Pyrrhic victory, chewing up a huge amount of salary for below-average play).
Shock then beat both Texas teams, Houston, who’d become an afterthought and would miss the playoffs, and Dallas, who had adopted a strategy similar to a mistake that Brett had already made: signing popular streamers, like xQc and former NRG player Seagull. It didn’t work for Dallas either, as they finished tenth.
At 3–2, Shock couldn’t afford to drop any wins, and they would play a revenge game against Crusty’s former team, the Robert Kraft–owned Boston Uprising. He had left Boston because he thought that he was being micromanaged by the general manager, despite believing that the team’s success was due mostly to his hard work. Similar to Brad coaching Selfless, Crusty had recruited unknowns and shaped them into the second-best team in the league after three stages. When Crusty asked the Krafts to give him full team control or release him, they made a bad decision. They let Crusty walk, the equivalent of letting Bill Belichick out onto the free market to keep Rex Ryan in the building, and it immediately blew up in their faces. Boston lost five matches in a row to start Stage 4, and Crusty was determined to deliver the sixth. He was notably agitated the day of the match, the cadence of his speech faster, his English harder to comprehend, as he flew through scenarios he thought his players might encounter from his old team.
After splitting the first two maps, the atmosphere in the dugout at halftime was tense. Crusty told me that the team were making incredibly amateur mistakes, and he was very hard on two of the Korean Shock players at halftime, Architect and Choihyobin. Brett had scouted and recruited Architect and Choi with the help of JunkBuck, and they’d been finding increasing time in the lineup under Crusty. Crusty considered Architect too timid on comms. Architect played Widowmaker, the sniper, meaning he had an excellent view of the field and enemy locations. Yet he never made a peep, as he was extremely shy naturally, which was only exacerbated by having to communicate in a new language. Crusty, whom Brett described to me as the most direct person he’d ever met, couldn’t understand Architect’s reticence. As Architect stood, eyes wide, cowering under Crusty’s instructions for shot calls, Super walked over and put his arm around him, looked at him, and called him “Gosu,” a Korean word that literally translates as a “highly skilled person” but is used more like “badass.” “He can use Korean. I’ll know what he means,” Super said to Crusty. “Yeah,” Moth chimed in. “Korean’s fine. We’ll follow your call.”
Crusty needed Architect to step up, because he planned to bench the team’s shot caller, Sinatraa. This wasn’t due to Sinatraa’s gameplay: Crusty believed strongly in optimizing hero compositions based on maps. If he thought a map was more suited to the heroes that Babybay or Architect specialized in, they got the start. It didn’t matter who was paid what or who was superior overall. In this way, he really was like Bill Belichick. For this approach to work, though, he needed Architect to assume some of Sinatraa’s shot-calling duties. He was clearly nervous as the players headed out to the stage: he couldn’t even sit down.
When Architect made his first call to the team, identifying the location of the enemy Widowmaker, everyone in the dugout let out a small cheer. He would continue to shot call, saying more during the next two maps than I’d heard him say in the past two months. Shock would win both, taking the match 3–1, with Super the winning player of the match. Crusty was ecstatic, but that didn’t stop him from being a coach. “I feel like we had many problems, and there were many mistakes that, I think you guys know better. But I’m very happy to have the win,” Crusty said, breaking out into a broad grin. Now the team could celebrate, pounding Crusty on the back and shouting what had become the team’s motto, “Let’s get iiiiit.”
The team were in high spirits the week after the win, though their mood was dampened when Gladiators notched their twenty-first win, becoming the sixth to do so, which eliminated Shock from the regular-season playoffs and the big money. At 4–2 in Stage 4, they still stood a good chance of making the Stage 4 playoffs if they could win at least three of their last four matches. Their last opponent of the season, the Shanghai Dragons, should be easy enough. Shanghai still hadn’t won a match. The other three were a murderers’ row of playoff-bound teams: Philadelphia Fusion, New York Excelsior, and the team that had beaten them in the first-ever OWL match, and twice more since then, the LA Valiant. Shock played Fusion immediately after learning they were eliminated from playoff contention, which may explain their flat performance and loss. NYXL appeared to be sandbagging, having locked up the #1 seed a month ago. Still, Shock lost to a sandbagging NYXL team, and for a fourth time to the LA Valiant. In the Season 1 battle of California, the record stood Northern California 1, Southern California 7.
What the team had expected to be an easy win against Shanghai instead turned out to be their highest-pressure match of the season. The Dragons entered the match with a 0–39 record, and this was their last chance to get a win. Blizzard Arena was sold out, and everyone who bought a ticket showed up. The place was packed, and every single person in the audience (besides Tyler, the guy who drove from Sacramento) wanted to see Dragons get a win. “Damn, I really don’t want to be the only team to lose to Shanghai,” Babybay said before the match.
In a typical Overwatch match, the crowd will cheer when their team definitely win a team battle, which usually means killing at least four of the enemy team. This match was not like that. When Geguri would use D.Va’s special ability to eat a Shock ult, the crowd would roar. When any Shock player died, even during a fight they were clearly winning, the fans chanted the player’s name who scored the kill. Somehow this environment worked for Shock, or perhaps the Dragons were just that bad, as Shock won 4–0. Although they’d finished a disappointing ninth for the season, they’d at least avoided the ignominy of being the only team to lose to Shanghai.
Crusty would not do better in Stage 4 than Brad had done in Stage 3. Under Crusty, Shock went 5–5 and finished the year 17–23. Some of the players wondered what could have been with better Mercy play in Stage 1 and a dedicated D.Va main that would have allowed Nevix to focus on damage. Talking to everyone in the organization, though, it was clear that the team were confident they had turned a corner. Whether by plan or by complete randomness rationalized as the plan all along, Brett found himself in the enviable position for Season 2 of owning one of the youngest rosters in the league, a team that featured both American and Korean representation and, most importantly, Crusty.
Spitfire managed to limp into the playoffs, going 4–6 in Stage 4. After Jack had fired Bishop, promoted Chang, and hired Agape and Susie, he insisted that the team release their bench players. Jack felt confident that they knew who their best six players were: Profit, Birdring (with a healed wrist), Gesture, Fury, Closer, and Bdosin. Susie pushed to keep NUS on the roster, as she’d noticed that the relationship between the team’s healers, Bdosin and Closer, could be volatile. This would prove prescient.
Despite making the playoffs, Spitfire had been in steady decline all season. After winning the Stage 1 playoff (and $100,000), they placed third in the Stage 2 championship (for no money), failed to qualify for the Stage 3 playoff at 5–5, and finished with a losing record in Stage 4. They qualified as the #5 seed with the same record as the #6 seed, Philadelphia Fusion. Both teams had finished the season 24–6, with their best play in the first half of the season, and nobody expected to see either team in the final. The playoff narrative mostly revolved around whether NYXL would choke. There was history behind it, as the same roster that now played for NYXL had previously dominated multiple seasons of OGN’s Apex Series before flaming out in the playoffs. NYXL had been sandbagging for a month and hadn’t shown anything new in scrims. Maybe they were resting on their laurels?
The rest of the playoff attention focused on the Los Angeles teams: the Stan Kroenke–owned Gladiators, and Noah Whinston’s Valiant. Both teams were white hot, finishing Stage 4 with 9–1 records. They’d even played each other, with Valiant winning 3–0. Then Valiant beat the Gladiators in the first round of the Stage 4 playoff and NYXL in the championship match. Despite the #1 seed NYXL’s season-long dominance, the recent win over them put the #2 seed Valiant firmly as a favorite to win it all. It was pretty much just those two, with nearly everyone I spoke to expecting a chalk championship, the #1 seed versus the #2 seed, with the only disagreement being whether Valiant could beat NYXL again. The closest thing to an endorsement that Spitfire received was when Monte, commenting on their chances, said, “Well, when they play well, they’re basically unbeatable.… We just haven’t seen them play well in a really long time.”
After losing their sixth match in a row to their former coach, Robert Kraft’s Boston Uprising won their final four matches to qualify for the playoffs as the #3 seed. Boston had a 73 percent win rate with Crusty and a 40 percent win rate without him. Crusty was very highly regarded among analysts and casters, which was why they believed Boston didn’t really stand a chance in the playoffs without him. Plus, DreamKazper had played for Boston. Nobody wanted them to win. They were tainted goods.
The poor play, team turmoil, but most of all the losing record over the last half of the season had taken their toll on the Spitfire players, particularly the hypercompetitive Bdosin. They felt immense pressure to perform in the playoffs, to make Jack believe in them again, to show the world that they were still the unbeatable team that had won the Stage 1 championship.