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Longer Than the Losing Streak Itself Was the Team’s Stagnation
Bringing in a rookie in the middle of a losing streak is common enough. In most cases, though, the rookie isn’t the last card solving the problem — he’s standing in for an organization whose options have narrowed after accumulated losses. DN SOOPers’ win over Hanjin Brion after signing 2007-born jungler Shavel (Kim Dan-woo) looked, at first, like the same story. The team was already on a 17-game losing streak when it signed Shavel, and his first LCK match ended in a loss too, stretching the streak to 18 games. The win over Hanjin Brion that followed was DN SOOPers’ first victory in 122 days.
The phrase “Shavel ended a 17-game losing streak,” then, doesn’t quite get the sequence right. DN SOOPers swapped junglers while already 17 games deep into the streak, lost once more with the new player in the lineup, and only broke the long drought in the match after that. This correction of the numbers may look minor, but it matters, so that this win doesn’t get packaged as a miraculous debut victory. Shavel wasn’t a player who solved everything on arrival — he was a rookie who passed through an initial failure before bringing the team a different tempo of play.
Swapping Junglers Rewires More Connections Than Any Other Position Change
In League of Legends, the jungler isn’t a position that syncs up with only one lane. Early pathing connects to lane priority across top, mid, and bottom, and decisions around the first objective affect the support’s rotations and the ADC’s scaling plan as well. That’s why swapping junglers changes the overall impression of a team more than a change at any other position does. In choosing Shavel over Pyosik (Hong Chang-hyun), DN SOOPers wasn’t simply swapping one player’s skill level for another’s — it was trying to redesign how the team generates early fights and lane priority in the first place.
Shavel had shown promise playing for Dplus KIA Challengers. What matters most from a rookie jungler isn’t one flashy highlight — it’s the ability to create windows where the team can fight, even working off limited information. That takes reading the enemy jungler’s position, minimizing losses based on lane state, and committing without hesitation the moment an opening appears. Where a veteran can offer stable macro play, a rookie can be the trigger that restores an aggression the existing team had lost. DN SOOPers’ expectation for Shavel leaned toward the latter.
The Process Against Hanjin Brion Was Different, Not Just the Result
In Shavel’s first LCK match, DN SOOPers ceded priority to BNK FearX’s Raptor and never managed to shift the flow of the game. It was exactly the kind of scene that could puncture whatever optimism came with fielding a rookie. Against Hanjin Brion, though, Shavel showed up throughout the match, including in the set they lost. A good game from a jungler doesn’t have to show up only in the kill-participation numbers from a winning set. It also shows up in applying pressure first, in giving the team a reason to converge on an objective before the opponent does, and in buying the laners time to make their next decision.
DN SOOPers beat Hanjin Brion 2-1. The opponent’s name makes the result bigger than it would otherwise be. What matters to a team on a long losing streak isn’t just a single win against a team it was expected to beat — it needs proof that its own design can hold up against strong opposition too. Interim head coach Yoo Byung-joon praised Shavel’s aggression highly after the match. What the team had been missing for a long stretch may not have been the ability to fight at all, but the confidence that it was allowed to start one.
The Turnaround Can’t Rest on One Rookie’s Shoulders
That said, it would be risky to read DN SOOPers’ turnaround purely as one rookie’s hero story. A losing streak this long doesn’t come from one position’s underperformance. It’s the accumulated result of draft priorities, lane matchups, communication around objectives, the ability to control losses in a bad game, and coaching-staff preparation. For a jungler to be able to make an aggressive choice, the laners have to respond to it, the support and mid have to open up vision for it, and the team as a whole has to hold together even after a fight goes wrong.
If anything, the most realistic lesson this win offers DN SOOPers is that it needs a structure to protect Shavel. A rookie becomes an easy target for opposing scouting. From here on, opponents will increasingly prepare around Shavel’s preferred champions, his early pathing, and his timing for aggressive engages. What will matter then is whether the team can widen the options available to its top side and bottom lane, rather than simply loading more pressure onto the rookie. A team that turns a single win into a streak isn’t a team that discovered a new star — it’s a team that built an environment where that star can fail and still be allowed to try again.
The Question 122 Days Later Isn’t a Win Streak. It’s Reproducibility.
DN SOOPers is out of its losing streak now, but it hasn’t stepped outside the standings race. Rounds 3 and 4 are where the fight over Play-In qualification intensifies in earnest, and in the Rise Group, every set feeds directly into the standings. The win over Hanjin Brion doesn’t immediately redefine the team’s overall strength. What is clear, though, is that a team that had been losing for a long stretch confirmed it can still make active choices within a game, and that it can turn a series back around even after losing a set it went into behind.
What’s worth watching from here isn’t how dramatic Shavel’s debut story turns out to be. What matters more is whether DN SOOPers can generate early-game priority repeatedly, whether Shavel’s aggression stays short of tipping the team into reckless fights, and whether the team can hold onto its strategy for the next set even after losing one. This 122-day win may be less the exit of a long tunnel than the first signpost confirming the team is pointed in the right direction. Whether DN SOOPers can turn that signpost into the start of a real turnaround depends not on one rookie jungler, but on the reproducibility the whole team shows in its next matches.
Source: Inven Global, August 4, 2026; LCK match results and DN SOOPers roster announcements, July–August 2026.
