Latest essay

What Happened to Vitality?

An empirical anatomy of the LEC's most volatile team.

Contribution Above Replacement

A composite performance score that rates a player's output against a replacement-level baseline at the same position, on an artificial scale, not a wins total.

Showing top 4 of 501 players across 9 datasets →

Explore the full CAR index →

League-relative figures, not cross-comparable between regions.

▲The CAR Index ·Contribution Above Replacement ·raw CAR vs pCAR ·Breakout watch ·Positioning charts ·Team over/under-achievers ·Underreported stories ·Empirical analysis ▲The CAR Index ·Contribution Above Replacement ·raw CAR vs pCAR ·Breakout watch ·Positioning charts ·Team over/under-achievers ·Underreported stories ·Empirical analysis

Latest writing All pieces →

League June 2026

Vitality's Downfall

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 essay

Underreported stories,
surfaced by the data.

JTE 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 projection-vs-record gap is a built-in narrative: expectation versus reality. Arguments are built to hold up, not to be agreeable. 0% AI-written content.

What the index surfaces

Raw CAR vs pCAR, breakouts & regression
Carry pool, damage share over gold share
Teams beating (or trailing) their roster
Career trajectories & crossovers
Replacement-floor & regional parity drift

Stories

Narrated conclusions from the CAR Index, data-armed analysis of pro League.

Jun 2026 League Vitality's Downfall →

Apr 2026 League BFX is Collapsing. Here's How to Fix It. →

Notes

Coming soon.

Recurring short data drops live here, the weekly residuals the CAR Index flags, written up in a sentence or two.

Backlogged until the index and its stories are right. Explore the CAR Index →

CAR Index

Contribution Above Replacement, league-relative player evaluation across professional LoL. Every row is a portal: open a player for their projection, 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? →

Charts

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.

25 GP+ always · low-sample players excluded

Record vs projection, pCAR (x) against raw CAR (y) The diagonal is "performing as projected." Above it, the record outruns the forecast (a breakout, or regression-bait); below it, a player is trailing his own projection.

What CAR is
and isn't.

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.

01 · The idea

Output above a replaceable player.

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.

replacement level · 0

The shaded height above the floor is CAR, output beyond what a freely available player would have given you, on the CAR scale.

02 · Team context, removed

It isolates the player from the team.

Raw stats reward players on winning teams and punish players on losing ones. CAR's component metrics are context-adjusted, laning, damage, vision and survival are measured against what the game state would predict, so a carry on a 2-win roster isn't buried by his teammates, and a passenger on a champion isn't flattered by them.

03 · What it cannot see

The honest part.

CAR is built from what shows up in the data. A great deal of competitive League does not:

× Shotcalling and in-game leadership
× Draft, the picks, the bans, the matchup math
× Communication, synergy, and the practice room
× Role sacrifice, players who facilitate rather than score

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.

04 · League-relative

Don't compare across regions.

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.

05 · The two numbers

raw CAR is the record. pCAR is the forecast.

The model produces two genuinely different scores, and the site shows both because the gap between them is the story.

raw CAR

"What did he actually contribute this split?"

A descriptive record of this dataset. No projection, no shrinkage.

pCAR

"What's the best estimate of his true skill going forward?"

Multi-year weighted, shrunk toward the role median on thin samples, aging-adjusted. A forward look, never a verdict on the current split.

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 breakout watch and regression watch. See it on the record-vs-projection chart →

About JTE

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 projection, 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