XANTARES out, gade in, and why it won’t work.

Let me set the scene for you. I’m sitting at the Robert Stanfield International Airport, with a cold pint while I wait for my flight to visit my parents in Montreal, and I finally read the news that XANTARES, BIG’s big name fragger has been benched in favour of gade, who’s acquisition had been announced the day before. BIG haven’t been able to get the results they’d been hyped for recently, barely holding onto a top 10 position on HLTV after less then stellar performances at the last 3 IEM and DreamHack events. Sitting there, with 2 /12 hours to wait, I thought to look into gade and BIG much deeper to see if I can solve why this deal was made. Clearly something needed to be changed, but why XANTARES, and why gade?

The first question that came to my mind when I saw the gade signing is “who is this guy”. I’d heard his name before from North, but that was during that rosters dark time when they were below the top 20 on HLTV. As a player though, what does gade bring to the table for BIG? For starters, he’s a textbook anchor, playing deep in whichever site that his IGL told him to go too. He played that role back during his “prime” with Optic Gaming, and he plays it now with HYENA’s. However to be honest, even looking at his stats back when he had veteran IGL Stanislaw leading him he wasn’t putting up the greatest numbers, with a 1.00 rating during his time with Optic and a 1.01 for his time with North. Furthermore, he’s put up incredibly inconsistent performances. Some games he’s playing at 1.25 or higher, others he sinks to below 0.80. These numbers don’t inspire confidence in me, as hoping for a player to pop off is usually a recipe for failure. Besides, BIG should be very familiar with key players being incredibly inconsistent.

So with all that being said, was this the right move? Personally, I’d have to say no. Gade is not, and could never be XANTARES in terms of skill and fragging power. BIG had a highly skilled core of him, tabseN, and syrsoN which while inconsistent, worked. Even trading out the less skilled players of k1to and tiziaN would be strange, with both having well defined roles for the team. Neither need to put up star numbers because they have XANTARES and tabseN to. Besides, the issue with BIG isn’t XANTARES, it’s their lack of a consistent AWPer. In his prime syrsoN was considered one of the top AWPer’s in the CS scene, but has since fallen into all over the place performances. He can show up and play a show stopping match, but he also has a nasty habit of disappearing from the match when his team needs him most. That seems to be the bigger stopping BIG from gathering trophies, not XANTARES. Either the Turkish phenom was offered a better deal somewhere else, or BIG have a higher opinion of gade then I do, but ultimately I cannot see this deal working out for the roster.