Are NAVI finally cooking?

It’s taken a little while for NAVI to get up to speed, in truth. It wasn’t ever going to be a quick one — jL and iM were a little wet behind the ears, s1mple was clearly distracted and replacing him is near impossible, and b1t is inconsistent.

Led by Aleksib, who for all his strengths has been removed from every team he’s been on for the last few years, there was as much potential for ridiculousness as there was sublimity.

There have been moments in time where NAVI have flattered to deceive, but it seems to all be coming together just in time for the run-up to the first CS2 Major.

They kicked off Group C with a simple win over a Complexity team who, until now, had been very dangerous on CS2 (more on that in a sec), but followed up with a very impressive win over G2 to fire themselves straight into the Group Final.

Despite some whispers of b1t leaving, that Aleksib quashed as ‘hopefully being a meme’, it was the mercurial Ukrainian who entered sicko mode (do the kids still say that?) and ripped holes in the G2 defence over and over again. 40 headshots in those 58 kills, by the way.

Normal.

He wasn’t alone, of course - iM rolled it back to his Major form, and w0nderful was his normal, stable, dominant self. He often goes under the radar, the AWPer, but he never seems to make a mistake.

NAVI might finally be here, ready to win it all, if their stars continue to sparkle like this.

Or, well, a group stage at BLAST Premier. But even the longest journey starts with a single step.

Complexity, for what it's worth, got spanked by an NIP team that got just nine rounds against G2. hallzerk missed some shots he really shouldn’t have, floppy looked a bit lost and even ELiGE wasn’t as sharp as he can be.

We will say, k0nfig dropped a 1.54. He does do that sometimes to the best teams in the world.

Like, twice a year anyway.