Well, the kings haven’t fallen just yet. NAVI has come into the group stage of ESL Pro League looking...alive, if not necessarily speedy.
After one of the longest overtimes we’ve ever seen on Wednesday, which culminated in a 37-34 NAVI victory over AGO, the CIS lineup showed up in a big way on Thursday with their second 2-0 of the week, this one over Evil Geniuses.
The first map against AGO was also about as good as NAVI has ever looked, with two players posting an absurd over 2.0 rating each. s1mple died just 4 times on that map. Perfecto only died 3.
Astralis, meanwhile, lost the battle of the Danes after Heroic made an eight-round comeback on Overpass and pulled out a win in Overtime on Vertigo.
Heroic sits atop the group with NAVI, albeit with a significantly worse round differential, and the game between those two powerhouses on Sunday should be quite the event especially if both go unbeaten until then.
Meanwhile, North America’s woes continue. What else is new?
Despite Junior declaring that Complexity is the best North American team right now, level with Team Liquid, that isn’t exactly a high bar to clear.
Both EG and Complexity are 0-2, with EG boasting an almost impressive -35 round differential according to HLTV. EG put up a fight against NAVI on Dust 2, and Complexity took a map off of AGO, but it was nowhere near enough.
With three days left to go, this is still any team’s group. But for NAVI or Heroic to get dethroned, one of the other four teams is going to have to make a big improvement right now.
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