Cloud9 dropped two legends of CS:GO to build a new roster, and while it seems to be working out, was the trade off worth it for the team’s star player?
Written by Mike Stubbs
5 min readPublished on
Cloud9 has long been one of the staple teams of North American Counter-Strike. For years, they’ve been one of the top teams in the region, and a big part of the improvement of NA when it comes to the international scene. But despite this, they can never really claim to be the top team in the world. Sure they have won some big events, but never really on a consistent basis.
Perhaps the best they have ever done was with the line-up that they had over the 16/17 season. They won the ESL Pro League, and made it to most of the big LAN competitions. There were a few slip ups along the way, but generally they looked solid. That’s why it was quite the surprise when it was announced that long time players – and legends of the scene – Jordan ‘n0thing’ Gilbert and Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek were benched during the off season and were replaced by the duo of Will ‘RUSH’ Wierzba and Tarik ‘tarik’ Celik from OpTic Gaming.
Since then, the team has had a pretty good run, but this new line-up still feels very new – and almost like it hasn’t quite hit its peak yet. So to find out why they decided to change things up, and how this new roster’s working out, we sat down with Jake 'Stewie2k' Yip at the ECS Season 4 finals in Cancun.
So you have kind of retooled the team a little bit by bringing in two new guys. What's the story behind that; why did that change happen?
We felt like Jordan and Shroud were not really cutting it. We felt like we gave them a lot of chances, as well. Even though it's been like a real sob-story where they both got cut and they're not on the team anymore, before that, actually, we got a lot of backlash for not cutting them. When we defend them we get backlash, and when we did what we thought was right, we also get backlash.
So, we ask for the community to just be a little patient with us, and I think these two new players that we brought in have good results – they're great players. I think, as for the old team, we just lacked a little motivation and a little hard work in us. Our work ethic was not as great as it is now, and now I think we have five people who work hard – and I think it shows in our results, because in our past tournaments, we've been doing pretty well.
Was there a specific moment, or a specific tournament, or a specific match where you kind of made that final decision? Where in your mind it was clear that you needed to make a change?
I think it happened after we lost to Virtus.Pro in the Major. We were so close to making it out of groups – we just needed to beat VP, and at the time VP was actually in their downfall, that's where they weren't even at their peak. If we can't beat a broken down team like that, then how are we ever gonna be, like, a consistent top team?
So once you decided you needed a change, how did you decide on the two players that you brought in? Were Tarik and Rush your first choices?
I think Tarik and RUSH were our picks because in their ELEAGUE run, RUSH showed that he's a really good CT side player, and he's a really passive type player, and he knows when to go aggressive. He's very vocal as well, like he speaks his mind, so before, we had a couple players who didn't really give their opinion as much, and we need more people to give opinions so that we can see what would work, what wouldn't work.
As for Tarik, before I joined Cloud9, he was always the star of NA, next to Shroud. He has a lot of skills, so we thought a little more skill might help, and just a little more chemistry, I guess.
How different is this version of the team versus the last one?
There's pros and cons to both. But I think the pros on the first team did not outweigh the pros on the second team, and I think we had more cons in the first team than we do on the second. We do have our problems right now as a team, but every team has their problems. But I think the problems we have are really minuscule, and really easily fixed.
In the grand scheme of things your team is still relatively new together and you haven’t been to all that many LANs. When in your mind do you think that you'll be at your peak performance, when you'll be winning competitions?
It's kind of hard to say, because I feel like we've been getting out of groups a lot. After DreamHack Masters Malmö, we've been working really hard, and it showed in our results. We've been making it out of groups, but lately I think we're just getting a little tired. We're still practising a lot, we're working hard, but not working as hard as before.
We're still coming up with new things, so that's really productive. We try to make our time more productive than wasted. For example, on our old team, sometimes we'd sign on an hour before, and in the hour that we're signed on we don't do anything. As for now, the hour that we sign on we go over new things, we show what's good, and ask for everyone's opinion. It's more productive: we try to make more productive things during the time.
I feel like we're not even at our peak yet, right now. We're fifth in the world, according to HLTV, and I think we're doing pretty well. And a lot of teams that we play, we can beat, so I think we're pretty close to the top, but just a little push would help.
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