The Dissection
Fifteen days, 71 games, 11 teams. Every chart on this page is built from MSI games alone: no domestic form carried in, no reputations, no benefit of the doubt.
Each radar is the player's shape against the rest of his role at MSI: the outer ring is two standard deviations above the field, the middle ring is the field's average. The axes are the components of that role's CAR formula, so this is the same model the index runs, pointed at fifteen days of games instead of a season.
Loading the MSI dataset…
Ranked by MSI-only CAR, minimum 4 games: the top ten, then the bottom five. A rank here is a claim about these fifteen days, nothing more, and nothing less. The middle of the pack lives in the CSV below.
Built from the Oracle's Elixir per-game refresh, MSI slice. Download the computed dataset or the raw per-game rows.
A new lens, from full kill coordinates: side-lane deaths past 20:00 that started the sequence (no kill anywhere in the prior minute, the first domino) and bought nothing, meaning the victim's team took no kill or objective in the minute after. Everything is per game, minimum six played. The third table is the price tag: first-domino deaths the enemy converted into a dragon or baron inside a minute. 68 of 71 MSI games carry coordinates.
Computed by tools/coord_isolated_deaths.py from the tabesports coordinate feed. Download the full ledger.
The LEC's most volatile team, and the fragility that was visible long before their 0-6 playoff collapse. Read through the CAR Index, fight by fight.
Read essayJTE is an independent analytics publication for professional League of Legends, built around the CAR Index, a composite, replacement-relative score of player value. The numbers find what conventional coverage misses; the writing explains why it happened.
Every gap between the record and a player's established level is a built-in narrative: expectation versus reality. Arguments are built to hold up, not to be agreeable. 0% AI-written content.
Narrated conclusions from the CAR Index, data-armed analysis of pro League.
Contribution Above Replacement, league-relative player evaluation across professional LoL. Every row is a portal: open a player for their skill estimate, components, and the stories the numbers surface.
CAR is a composite performance score measuring a player's output against a freely replaceable player at the same position, on an artificial scale, not a wins total, and not WAR. Figures are not cross-league comparable. What is CAR? →
Positioning lenses on the CAR Index. The outliers are the story, hover any point, click it to open the player.
League-relative figures, points are not cross-comparable between regions or years.
A composite, replacement-relative score of individual player value. Rigorous on the logic, deliberately honest about what it can't see. Read this before you argue with a number.
Every league has a freely available floor: the players a team could sign tomorrow with no real cost. Call that replacement level, concretely, the 25th percentile of qualifying players at each position. CAR is how far a player's output rises above that floor, a composite score on an artificial scale, not a count of wins. A replacement-level player scores 0. The rest is what you actually bought.
Raw stats reward players on winning teams and punish players on losing ones. So CAR is built almost entirely from numbers that cannot carry team level: a player's share of his own team's farm, gold or kills; his damage per unit of gold spent; his warding measured against his own teammates'; and his lane result measured against the opponent standing in front of him. A share cannot rise just because the team is winning, and a duel with the enemy laner is a duel whoever else is on the map.
Every role is built separately, because the same statistic means different things in different seats. Gold difference at ten minutes is close to a clean duel result in the top lane and nearly meaningless in the bot lane, where two players and a jungler decide it.
The same logic is applied to the champion itself. Some champions inflate the box score through their kit alone, not through better play, so CAR treats every champion as a park factor and strips that inflation out. What remains is a champion-neutral estimate of the player. A utility pick is no longer punished for farming less, and a stat-padding pick is no longer flattered for farming more.
CAR is built from what shows up in the data. A great deal of competitive League does not:
So system-oriented junglers and facilitating supports can read lower than their real contribution. CAR is a strong prior, not a verdict. The number opens the argument; the film closes it.
Replacement level is recomputed inside each league and split, and cross-region samples are reset. A +30 in the LCK and a +30 in a development league are not the same achievement; they're measured against different floors. CAR ranks players within a competitive environment, never across them.
The model produces two genuinely different scores, and the site shows both because the gap between them is the story.
A rookie with a monster split posts a high raw CAR but a shrunk pCAR, the model doesn't trust the sample yet. That tension is the engine behind every "is he actually this good" argument. See it on the record-vs-estimate chart →
JTE is an independent analytics publication for professional League of Legends. It is built around the CAR Index, Contribution Above Replacement, a composite, replacement-relative score of individual player value, and the stories that the index surfaces but conventional coverage misses.
The approach is empirical: a forecaster minimizes surprise, but a story maximizes it. The same model devices, read for their residuals and gaps, become narrative engines, the player whose record outruns his established level, the roster beating its own pieces, the floor quietly rising across a region.
Pieces run long when the argument demands it. Data is used when it's honest, and always with its limits stated. The goal is analysis the scene deserves but rarely produces for itself.
| Author | JTE, pseudonymous |
| Coverage | Professional League of Legends, player value (CAR / pCAR), team performance, positioning & trajectory analysis |
| Format | The interactive CAR Index · positioning charts · data-armed long-form stories · short takes on Twitter / X |
| Contact | Twitter / X, DMs open |