StarCraft II: EG releases PuMa with immediate action

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By Tobias 'noxilicious' .

Mar 15, 2013 16:17

Due to a lack of good results Evil Geniuses is releasing one of their Korean players. The Terran was considered one of the best as he was on the peak of success back then but lately the good results were missing, which ultimately led to parting ways with each other.

EG's CEO Alex Garfield announced today that

Ho Joon 'PuMa' Lee and EG will part ways. Both parties were not able to renegotiate a new contract, considering the recent performances of PuMa.

The story of PuMa was the first one of its kind. Back in July 2011, EG signed PuMa after his win of the first NASL season. That was not the peak of his success however, as he also managed to win one IEM trophy, Silver from DreamHack 2011 and other top finishes in premier tournaments. 2012 was not as successful as 2011 for PuMa, but he still continued to show strong performances all around the world. A second place at IEM WC, a third place at Assembly Winter and top eight placements at Iron Squid and NASL 3 are only some of the major victories of PuMa.

All these big victories are only one side of the coin. It is known that Koreans tend to be better in Starcraft II than foreigners and PuMa was not exception. Therefore the results inside of Korea were important as well. Inside of Korea the performances of PuMa were not really good as he failed to qualify for Code A or even Code S. With the current standings of 1-6 in the Proleague after round three, he was clearly the worst player of the EG-TL lineup. These bad performances were clearly one of the reasons why PuMa has been released as it is clearly outlined in the statement.

Exception of the official statement

"We at Evil Geniuses are very, very thankful for PuMa’s contributions to our team, which obviously begs the question: why are we now parting ways with him? Well, the answer to this is actually pretty simple. Going back to the beginning of this write-up, just as much as Ho Joon is a force to be reckoned with outside of Korea, his performance within Korea has been pretty lackluster. And, for a team that definitely needs a shot in the arm in Proleague, and that has made a commitment to its fans to improve in Proleague, it doesn’t make sense to invest so heavily in a player whose performances come far more frequently outside of Korea than they do within Korea. PuMa was one of our highest-paid Korean players, and we felt that to truly improve our performance in Proleague, we needed to get more results for our investment. We view Ho Joon as a member of our family, and we didn’t want to simply remove him from our team – in fact, we wanted to, and tried to, renegotiate his contract in a way that would make more sense for both sides (perhaps by balancing a decrease in salary with less Proleague participation and more non-Korean event attendance), but ultimately this approach was not desirable to him, and both of us agreed that it would be best to release him."

Source: evilgeniuses.net