Today, it was announced that 100Thieves have parted ways with their Head Coach, Neil “pr0lly” Hammad. While there is no information on the exact reason for his departure, or who will replace him, this may be the first of many changes for the organization. In a video posted on their YouTube channel, new General Manager Chris “PapaSmithy” Smith said:
“And now it’s a case of with kind of the first era of 100 Thieves, that first two years of LCS coming to a close, and pr0lly leaving is definitely a — a sign of that, it’s a case of really goal setting what 100 Thieves can be in the future because two years is not a lot of years in League of Legends.”
And those two years have flown by. Pr0lly joined 100Thieves in November of 2017, right before the inaugural spring split for the team. And despite getting to Worlds last year and qualifying for the Group Stage, the team has had a few shakeups in their roster, the first one being William “Meteos” Hartman leaving the team in July of 2018.
When Meteos left, he was quite vocal about his departure, taking to Twitter to say that he had been traded to FlyQuest without being given a starter spot, and this was announced before 100Thieves had an announcement or press release prepared, which caused many to speculate on the reasons.
According to pr0lly, Meteos’ desire to leave the team was after they explained to him and top laner Kim “Ssumday” Chan-ho that they would not be playing at Rift Rivals 2018, but he was still surprised that Meteos wanted to look for other teams. You can watch the video of his interview with Travis Gafford below:
Another major shakeup that the team experienced right before Worlds 2018 was the benching and subsequent departure of their AD Carry Sun “Cody Sun” Li-Yu. Despite the veteran player not being perceived as a top AD Carry, fans were shocked and upset when he was replaced with
Richard Samuel “Rikara” Oh. Cody Sun had even gone with them to Korea for Worlds as a substitute but was never put on the roster for a game, despite Rikara only being a rookie and not having much experience in a main stage or international setting.
And although fans wanted to know the reason for Cody Sun’s benching, pr0lly did not want to speak on it, saying:
“There’s really no positive side to it because no matter what, it’s going to be, like, not completely truthful, because it’s going to be, like, only my perspective or only the organization’s perspective, and then there’s no benefit to it because it doesn’t change how the outcome is. It would only be like airing dirty laundry because no one is removed from the team, it’s like ‘Oh, we loved it and it was great and we were winning everything and this terrible thing happened where he just wasn’t allowed to play with us.’ Like, it’s always “something bad” happened, so that’s the result of it… it’s kind of inappropriate to talk about that stuff.”
Pr0lly’s departure comes after a lackluster 2019 for the team, where they finished 10th in Spring Split and 8th in Summer, not even getting a chance to run the gauntlet for a possible 3rd seed to Worlds. With two veteran and well-known players leaving the team, ending in 3rd place in their group at Worlds 2018, and leaving each split near the bottom of the lineups, it’s not surprising that a change in management staff was needed. It is not known if PapaSmithy made the call or if it came from the team’s founder and CEO, Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag. The video where PapaSmithy and Nadeshot’s discussion regarding the future of 100Thieves is below:
We will continue to see in the off season what other changes are on the horizon for 100Thieves and other League of Legends teams.
