Turns out you ARE allowed to play your sixth man on more than one map. CC: Astralis.
NaVi have been experimenting with playing B1T over flamie quite a bit at ESL Pro League, and the results have been... alright, forget about the results. He's looked decent enough, which, at least against Cloud9, was better than flamie.
He outfragged flamie despite playing one map fewer. Yes, really. He didn't even do that well.
aizyesque mentioned on our podcast (it's great, go listen!) that he thought B1T being a sixth man was merely a ploy to undertake flamie as the 5th in some weird coup d'état, and that bizarre theory appears to have some weight to it.
We happen to think B1T is pretty good - hell, he had one of the highest headshot percentages in the world last year, so if nothing else, he's got mechanics. He does appear to get caught looking in the wrong places or positioning himself weirdly sometimes, and maybe he needs some guidance to become a top quality player. That's at least our belief.
But will he get that at NaVi? There's certainly a debate to be had - and it's clear which side Richard Lewis falls on. If you can't read the tweet for... some reason, he doesn't think that B1ad3 and Boombl4 are good enough as leaders and tacticians to get NaVi to the place they should be.
He kind of has a point. NaVi choked two leads to FURIA, but it goes deeper than that. They have s1mple and electronic, and they're not one of the greatest teams of all time. That sentence alone should be a red flag, but often it becomes a question of s1mple as a teammate.
Unfortunately for NaVi, they might have moved too late. They've successfully executed the North/MIBR/Cloud9 special - wait 'til all the good young players from your region are on teams better than you, then try and make changes. Nafany, chopper and JAME would all be interesting IGL choices for this team; but by now, they're all happy, settled and... are they better than NaVi?
Are... are NaVi the fourth best team in CIS?
We don't have a good answer for that.
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