As much as people love to talk about the gap between Western and Korean teams closing, the smart money is still on SK Telecom T1 taking home gold at the 2017 Mid-Season Invitational. While there’s little doubt that top-tier LCK stars are a cut above their Western counterparts, Team SoloMid top laner Kevin “Hauntzer” Yarnell stirred up some controversy at the post-playoff press conference by claiming the strength of the new generation of Korean import players has been greatly exaggerated. “Everyone in the community was saying that it was going to be a really rough split for native NA tops and they’re going to have to prove themselves,” Hauntzer said of the hype around new imports like Jang “Looper” Hyeong-seok and Lee “Flame” Ho-jong. “But I think that’s maybe just because of how the community overrates Korean players, and getting to play against them during the split, they’re not as good as the fans say they are, and it was just kind of playing against mediocre opponents.” But do the stats back-up Hauntzer’s bluster? To find out, theScore esports compared the 2017 spring season stat averages of Korean imports in the EU LCS and NA LCS against domestic players and non-Korean imports. Our research only counts Korean players who take up an import slot, so ethnic Korean players who have been naturalized into a region were counted as “domestic” for the purposes of this infographic. Before we get started, it’s worth mentioning that, with such a small sample size, results should be taken with a considerable grain of salt.