First of all, we want to say – we made a mistake. We shouldn't have called our ranking "Best teams of 2020."

We didn't pay attention to teams' achievements in 2020 when we were creating the ranking, relying only on advanced statistical parameters.
Next time we will take it into account.

Though the only anomaly in our ranking was the placement of Vitality (#8) and OG (#3). Everything else was more or less logical, and it looks like if we just switch Vitality's & OG's placement – it'd be, probably, fairer.

But how it turned the way that Vitality, one of the best teams of 2020 by achievements and general impression, took only 8th place?

How did we rate teams?

We took all 2020 events with a prize pool higher than $50.000 and removed those teams who haven't played many S-tier events in 2020 (such as Gambit and Spirit).

Then, we have chosen 10 statistical parameters that are important and could describe the performance of players deep enough and compared them to average numbers across players who participated in the mentioned 2020 events.

We counted average numbers across all players of the team and then rated the team relying on the received information (so it was a way to rate an average individual performance by advanced stats).

• Damage Difference per round – advanced ADR parameter. We count it as "ADR - Damage Received per round = Damage Difference".
The average number here is negative because of a little count of outstanding players with extremely impressive performance (sh1ro, ZywOo, S1mple, NiKo). But in general, most of the players are indeed in the negative here.

• KAST – percentage of rounds where a player brought the impact including flash-assists.

• Flash Duration Per Throw – average time of your opponents being blinded per 1 flashbang thrown.

• First Bullet Accuracy – ratio of your first bullets' hits to all first bullets fired.

• Utility Damage per round – Fire Damage per round + HE Damage per round.

• Winrates of the team in 4x5 and 5x4 situations after the first frag or death of the player.

• Opening Duels Winrate.

• Grenade Usage Percentage – is the percentage of grenades a player uses on average. For example, if this number is 80%, then, a player dies with 20% of his grenades in pockets.

• Average Kill Time – the time you need to cause 100 damage on average. It's significantly lower for AWPers, of course.

We took 10 best teams by each parameter and gave them points from 10 to 1 respectively (10 points for the best team).

Why are Vitality in 8th place?

Looks like because of ZywOo.

At first glance: Mathieu showed an incredible performance in 2020, but in general, Vitality haven't performed well by those advanced parameters if we look at all players simultaneously.

Simply, ZywOo outweighs everyone in Vitality. But here comes a very controversial thing.

Let's say that Vitality set the focus of their play for ZywOo, which seems obvious and logical. If you have such a player in the team, you want him to have as much impact as possible.

Then, other players are partially becoming supports in this perspective and they should have high numbers in advanced statistics at least in grenades' impact and non-shooting parameters.

Let's take a look at the pentagons of ZywOo and Vitality, they look pretty similar.

Then, let's make such a pentagon for each Vitality player and see what happens.

Interesting thing: look how pentagons of players differ from each other.
So, every player in Vitality, except ZywOo, has statistically strong and weak sides, but if we count those numbers for all players... It was not enough to place Vitality higher than 8th place in the system we used.

The conclusion: Vitality has a unique playstyle with ZywOo outshining all the players. Each player has a strong side and a clear understanding of his role in the team.

It works, obviously, and it's a very exciting thing – Vitality perfectly use their players and made it work very well.

Actually, it'd be interesting to see how Vitality would change their playstyle, if ZywOo departs the team for some reason.

What could we do better?

Except the heading, surely.
• Damage Difference is a nice parameter, but we think we could choose a better option to add to a pentagon both for teams & players (all the time 5/5)
• We should consider more statistical parameters in creating our ranking.
• We shouldn't ignore the achievements of the team in general.
• We think about making a better emphasis in "Introduction" on significant periods for each team.

The thing we are pleased with – the ranking looks pretty fair except OG and Vitality placements.

Next time we will do better and improve, that's for sure.

You can share your own suggestions and criticism using support bubble at SCOPE.GG or via our Discord-server.

Best regards, SCOPE.GG team.