What’s the best Overwatch League team of all time? Unless we invent a time machine, we’ll never know, but thanks to SAMP, I can try to figure it out – and you can all have fun rooting for your favorite team!

I’ve selected what I consider to be the best 28 teams in OWL history – out of 72 total – and plan to pit them against each other in a multi-tier tournament bracket. The final eight teams will square off in a bracket that’s identical to this year’s eight-team, double-elimination championship bracket. Four of the teams in that bracket will be the teams that won each year’s title.

The other four teams will be determined by the results of a 24-team preliminary playoff, which consists of four six-team mini-brackets. Qualifying teams will include the four runners-up from each season championship, along with 20 wild-card teams, as determined by the best win-loss records in the regular season, which is also how overall seeding will be determined.

Here’s the list of teams, in their seeding order:

Championship teams (C1-C4): 20 San Francisco, 19 San Francisco, 21 Shanghai, 18 London

Runners-up (R1-R4): 19 Vancouver, 21 Atlanta, 18 Philadelphia, 20 Seoul

Wild cards (W1-W20): 20 Shanghai, 20 Philadelphia, 18 New York, 19 New York, 21 San Francisco, 21 Seoul, 20 Paris, 21 Dallas, 21 LA Gladiators, 21 Chengdu, 21 Houston, 18 LA Valiant, 20 Florida, 20 Guangzhou, 18 Boston, 19 Hangzhou, 21 Philadelphia, 18 LA Gladiators, 20 New York, 19 LA Gladiators

Every franchise except Toronto and Washington is accounted for. If I like how this goes, though, I might consider doing an opposite tournament, to determine the worst team in OWL history, so those franchises should be well-represented in that.

And how will it go? Using SAMP, of course, and using the same win probabilities that I used to fill out brackets for the 2021 championship. However, I’m still not happy with the SAMPs for teams from 2020, so I’ll be doing an adjustment to the SAMP of each team from that season just like I did for predictions the end of that season. With that in mind, here are the records and SAMPs for each team in the tournament:

Here are the initial brackets:

And here’s the finals bracket: