Interesting read, thanks. One aspect that I think is very relevant when qualitatively looking at this sort of data is what specific heroes are separated from each other. For example, it makes good sense for the mid and carry to often be separated because they both want to farm. Also if all the cores are sticking together, any plays you make start to become way too obvious. But it often makes no sense for a support to be separated from his team if he can't farm fast, instead he should generally be moving around behind one of his cores ready to make a play or to save him. Of course there are situations where you try to give vision of an area, you are placing a ward, or you are farming yourself, but still. If you are very split up as a team, it's harder to do any sort of quick moves when you get some information from the enemy.
This is something that I thought about when it was a discussion point that "OG likes to play illusion heroes". Also Invoker falls into a similar category. Essentially my feeling is that the reason they do so well with such heroes is that they can push out lanes without sacrificing fight readiness and without giving information away. For example you push out a side lane with Invoker, and the rest of your heroes stick as 4 off the map somewhere, maybe one of them farms some other lane. OG has been very good about knowing where to be with these other heroes in order to get favorable mid to lategame fights. When you play "standard" heroes, you generally have to split up a bit more visibly to get lanes pushed out, which requires your entire team to play slightly differently.
It's a bit hard to pay attention to these sorts of things in real time via stream and see where exactly each player is and what exactly are they doing. But I do think there is some credibility in c9 being split up too much at times and for no good reason. Or maybe not completely split up, but otherwise poorly positioned. An interesting case for example was the Empire smoke at 34-35min to c9's ancients, where Empire killed Fata and EE and also Aui died later.
Here Fata is farming the ancients and EE is farming on the high ground. MSS is in the trees, and Aui and PLD are close by on the lane. Clearly c9 isn't trying to split up to get maximum efficiency, but the position is sort of weird in the sense that though they are all almost together, they are in fact not in position to help each other if the initiation comes. MSS is also not close enough to the ramp to actually break the smoke. These sorts of things are I think quite significant when it comes to how good a team is mid to lategame. You want to be grouped up at the right times, and very importantly also positioned in the right way when you are grouped up. The worst thing that can happen is that you "waste time" grouping up but you still get jumped and lose the fight.
^really good points I hadn't really considered before.
Could apply similar analysis to teams smokes, as Im sure vs EMpire EGs smokes were just so....meh. One where they smoke from behind their t3s and when creep waves mid-map, so it takes ages to run anywhere and makes it really obvious.
Then game two with dd on RTZ, crit is leading the way, they find the veno and he just force staffs away. If puck properly positioned they burst the veno and get rosh for free.