NiP's talent factory keeps churning

We spent six months taking the mickey out of NiP for playing their academy players alongside their $1m signing.

Turns out we were right to, but not quite in the way we thought; the trick was to play them INSTEAD of their $1m signing.

phzy, whose name is unjustly not pronounced 'fizzy', stepped in for the sick dev1ce for his first game for NiP in the semi-final of IEM Winter. And as you probably gathered from the name of the newsletter, and this article... it went pretty well.

G2's 'losing to stand-ins' curse continued as fizzy - sorry, phzy - came up big as NiP pulled off a comeback on Nuke to win it in OT. Whatever the opposite of coming up big is what NiKo did during that comeback.

Though they lost Dust 2, phzy still stepped it up; and in the final map, NiP obviously came out on top. It wasn't necessarily pretty, but it was certainly gritty - and phzy slotted in quite neatly.

phzy is the third off the NiP talent conveyor belt, and while results have been mixed for them, generally they seem to be producing pretty solid players; which is a great sign, given how difficult it had been to source new Swedish players.

For the love of god, how long have Relaxa and FREDDyFROG been on the third or fourth best Swedish team?

To make the grand final with a young kid making his debut really validates NiP's belief in their system - both in the server, and their system for helping players mature out of it, too.

What it doesn't do, though, is validate spending $1m on dev1ce. You'd have been better off picking up your own academy players!

I mean we're sort of joking, but...