Photo by: GosuGamers
It was announced today by EG's CEO Alexander Garfield that the team will part ways with the Korean Terran Ho Joon "Puma" Lee, saying that the parties could not renegotiate a new contract to reflect Puma's recent performances.
Puma joined Evil Geniuses in July 2011 and continued his rise to power, bringing the team one NASL and one IEM trophy, silver from DreamHack 2011 as well as multiple high finishes in premier tournaments. Despite the slight decline in performance in 2012, Puma continued to do well outside Korea, finishing second at IEM WC and third at Assembly Winter, as well as reaching top eight in Iron Squid and NASL 3.
His results in Korean tournaments, however, have been the absolute opposite for Puma. Ho Joon is currently 1-6 after Proleague round three and is among the worst performing players on EG-TL and this is clearly outlined in the official statement as one of the reasons for his release.
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.
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