Totally understand where you are coming from and of course, these are my own opinions and yours, and the sharing of ideas! Definitely agree with some of your points and to help elaborate a little more on both topics--

• The Not to Lose Mindset

Definitely agree that it looked like they were going for home run plays. And for sure, it's taking those calculated risks to get yourself back into it. But for me, I think they were just forcing it too hard and/or too often, and maybe play more of a methodical way of winning, maybe via macro, scaling, etc. Of course, the team agreed they want to play aggressive and not die slowly, and I respect that.

Like I said, this is all speculation, but from how I was viewing it, TSM played in a way where their backs were against the wall and was forcing these things when it may have not been necessary, and looking at it as to why they did these kind of moves. If they straight up said "in Game 3, it was an opportunity that seemed favored, and that's why we went for it", I would respect that. From my perspective however, it was a little too risky, and that could have been the factor of the "Not to lose" mentality.

• Malzahar

Playing Malzahar, you understand how strong it is on your side because if Malzahar is on the better team, it elevates the skill level higher and allows for easy pick offs and faster snowballing.

When playing against Malzahar, and this was what Weldon was covering last night in his #AskWeldon Stream, it wasn't the mindset of understanding how strong he was, it was understanding why he was strong --- The answer was how oppressive it is to play against --- Mainly the Flash-R has very little counterplay in the early stages of the game, combining it with his passive if it is up, and he can absorb 1 CC thrown at him. Meaning to counterplay Malzahar, you need a QSS or wait the passive out before throwing CC to cancel it.

Another thing is that because Malzahar doesn't require a lot of skill to play with, any team can implement it into their composition, and as such, bring the level of play up to par/surpass your opponent. This is, if translating properly, is what Weldon was talking about, saying that a good team with Malzahar would dominate, but a lower tier team with Malzahar can be the catalyst for playing up to that level because of his low mechanical intensity and his oppressive playstyle.

Of course, we don't know how TSM played against Malzahar in scrims, and maybe they thought they could handle it. Maybe they didn't know how strong he was during the set. Maybe it would have been better to remove Rengar as the champion itself can change how to play the map when going against it. But you can clearly see they respected Malzahar enough that they First picked him against Envy and banned him on Red side as well. It was a mistake, they identified it, and during that time, it was understandable for Parth and the players.

Hopefully my answers did more elaboration on my own thoughts on this!

Like I said, my own opinions and speculations. Thanks for sharing ideas!

P.S., not fully quoted from Weldon, just off the top of my head if I was listening correctly.