With their new recruit out of action, the Ninjas are facing some difficult decisions when it comes to reshuffling their team
Incredibly strict rules on Valve’s part with regards to the Visa Waiver program have all but destroyed NiP’s hopes of making a deep play-off run at MLG Columbus 2016, the first $1m major that is currently underway across the pond in Columbus, Ohio.
The Ninjas’ recruit to replace allu with pyth – formerly of Nordic teams n!faculty and Orbit as well as North American sides Luminosity and Winterfox – has been blocked, with the player barred from entering the United States despite nationals of many European countries being allowed to travel visa-free for up to 90 days.
According to pyth’s former Winterfox teammate LeX, both he and his Swedish teammate Devilwalk – who had also moved to North America – were turned around at the US border when in the process of moving south from Toronto, when their contracts were sold to Winterfox.
Details remain murky at best, but all that matters is that pyth will not be participating at MLG Columbus.
Despite possibly arriving in time for the play-offs, should NiP advance in a group with Luminosity, mousesports and FlipSid3, he will not be allowed to play due to NiP’s coach and in-game leader threat stepping in yesterday in their overtime victory over FlipSid3 on cache.
With pyth ruled out, NiP go from a fringe contender – who many top teams predicted in interviews prior to the event would be one of the favourites to make the semi-finals – to a team merely hoping to make the play-offs and secure a spot at the next major later in 2016.
But how can NiP adjust to this change on the fly with no time to practice?
pyth has a career rating of 1.07 rating, which generally means he falls in the abyss between being a good player and a star.
With NiP he has been much worse with a rating of just 0.94 – whether that be due to having to adjust, the added pressure or the new roles that he has taken on.
On the other hand, threat – who joined the team in mid-February as a full-time coach and in-game leader – is a tactical genius, but not much of a fragger.
In his short-lived CS:GO career his average rating has been 0.82, with all but a two-map qualifier badly in the red on his statistics page.
Given the contrast in the players’ styles and skill sets, NiP face an incredibly tough task of trying to fit threat in without ruining what they have built so far. You do not want to waste months of practice simply to accommodate a player whose skill set is not up to scratch to begin with.
Instead, threat will likely be taking over pyth’s roles in order to allow the other four members to continue in their usual ones. That would also let NiP run their full tactics as intended, with threat certainly capable of executing was pyth usually does despite severely lacking in the firepower department.
Given how skilled NiP’s stars f0rest and GeT_RiGhT are, that should work perfectly fine on their terrorist sides, as it did yesterday.
But the team face a much more difficult task on defence, when the opposing team can figure out where threat is playing and simply start targeting him.
This is no criticism of threat, who has been put in a situation that he did not bargain for. He has not played competitive CS:GO in nearly a year, and was not skilled enough to fit a team such as NiP in the first place.
So whatever happens, do not point fingers at him.
That will lead to overall rotations where he may start playing – for example middle on cache, find himself by the forklift in A a couple of rounds later, and sometimes play the B site.
That will suit him well, and hopefully allow NiP to do better overall.
But it comes at a cost. Whereas Xizt may be used to playing in the A site, now he may sometimes need to make room for threat. Alternatively, perhaps sometimes friberg now needs to leave his beloved B bombsite.
It is going to be a fascinating sub-plot in NiP’s future games, seeing how threat – who is the puppet master of the team – ends up handling the situation where he needs to move himself around on the map based on how the opponents are playing.
In his first game against FlipSid3, threat wound up having a couple of key rounds – including a fast triple kill in the A site at a time when a round loss would have bankrupt NiP.
But their opposition will only get tougher from here on out, and NiP cannot rely on their coach to put up similar numbers as friberg.
The next days will be an even larger test for NiP. Yesterday f0rest and GeT_RiGhT combined for 69 kills in 36 rounds, combined to rest of the Ninjas’ cumulative 55.
It will only get harder from here, which will force the former superstars to have even better games individually.
NiP will not be competing for a semi-final spot – if they are come Saturday, someone screwed up somewhere along the way – but that does not make them any less intriguing or entertaining to watch.
threat’s leadership will be tested in new ways, and the stars will face added pressure.
The question is, can NiP work its magic once more for a play-off spot?
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