Overwatch League Standings Going into The Kickoff Clash - West Region
The qualifying matches for the first tournament of the 2022 Overwatch League have all concluded. At this point in the season all teams have played the same number of matches with the same number of points available, before any bonus points for winning the Kickoff Clash are added on following the tournament finals.
This makes now a good time to take a look at how the teams stack up against each other. Which teams have exceeded our expectations, and which have fallen short.
Here are the season standings for the western region
Standings correct as of 31/05/2022, source: overwatchleague.com
What we expected
Shock still good, Titans still bad
Standing tall atop the leaderboard are the San Francisco Shock. As the only two time winners of the Overwatch League, this is arguably to be expected. What makes the Shock's continued dominance more impressive however is that their 2022 roster only has one returning player, Minki "Viol2t" Park. The rest of the squad are OWL rookies, drawn from the ranks of Contenders teams, particular O2 Blast, who the Shock has brought into their organisation as their academy team.
Special credit must be given to rookie tank player Colin "Coluge" Arai for stepping in to the roster last minute following the shock (pun fully intended) -ing retirement of former main tank Matthew "super" DeLisi, and still playing up to an Overwatch League level.
At the other end of the spectrum, and the standings, are the poor Vancouver Titans. Their western rosters don't look anywhere near as good as the Runaway roster that took them all the way to the 2019 Grand Final. They finish this tournament as one of only two winless teams, alongside Paris.
While it's undeniable that there is talent on this team, DPS players Niclas "sHockWave" Jensen and Maximilian "Seicoe" Otter have both had huge individual plays this year. Vancouver main support Petja "Masaa" Kantanen made it to the Grand Finals with Atlanta Reign last year. Something must be seriously wrong at a coaching/organisational level for this to keep on happening.
Not to speak too badly about the Titans as an organisation. But when I went to check their page on overwatchleague.com, I saw that their roster details have still not been added: https://titans.overwatchleague.com/en-us/roster. It's not a great look when volunteer run Liquipedia is more up to date than your official page.
[Update: The Titans have announced that Seicoe is being dropped from their squad]
Better than expected: London Spitfire
Despite their middle of the pack placement in the standings, the London Spitfire have outperformed many fans' and analysts' expectations. While this is not surprising given their almost totally winless season last year, Overwatch 2 is a whole new game. Going into the tournament tied at the bottom of many power rankings, and going on to barely not qualify for the Kickoff Clash is a huge achievement for the Spitfire.
What's even more surprising is that they've been able to find success going against the meta. Focusing almost entirely on the Reinhardt/Mei brawl comps, and being pretty damn good at it!
Looking forward to the Kickoff Clash
Source: Overwatch League on Twitter
The 8 teams with the best match record so far will be going head to head in a double elimination bracket to decide the winner of the Kickoff Clash. The undefeated San Francisco Shock have to be the favourite going in. We haven't seen how they match up against two of the top four teams, Dallas Fuel and Florida Mayhem, and the fourth was LA Gladiators who took the Shock to five maps.
Has a relatively easy strength of schedule that included both New York Excelsior and Vancouver Titans given us unreasonably high opinion of this rookie squad? We'll have to see once the Kickoff Clash kicks off on June 2nd.