washedradiant [#13]
im basing off this year, he has a 1.00 rating so far aggregated matches and thats just not the expectations I have for him considering how insane he is in. I have watched the sen games and see that hes not the same player I know. Athemys you have to understand something, zekken is supposed to be the best in the game. He is, anecdotally he is tiers ahead of anyone else I have played against. In scrims he drops 30-40 bombs pretty consistently, when he is in tier 2 subbing he shits on everyone, his ranked stats are probably the highest. Everything fits, but for him to have a 1.00 just doesnt make sense. The reason I have heard actual smart people say reduxx replace zekken on duelist is because they think zekken needs to go initatior since if you actually watch the sen games, his entry deaths dont give enough impact in the game as he could have. I know for some of yall this migth sound crazy but I agree with the opinion. Zekken can play almost any role at a very high level, many people dont know that. I understand he has good performances but considering what I ahve seen from him seperate from franchise he should have greatest of all time performances. I rank him above aspas any day but it just never translates into his franchise games.
That is peak recency bias. The year barely started yet youre making big assumptions about his performance. Also I know about all those things that you've mentioned and that is exactly the reason why I blame their teamplay/system instead of the individual. I've also vod reviewed all of their recent games for the same reason because I couldn't believe zekken went negative and I came to the conclusion that they as a team were making questionable decisions and couldn't set him up properly. I also think you underestimate the gap between T1 and every other level. Zekken could very well be the closest player we've got to Zywoo/S1mple in terms of pure potential in valorant but every T1 teams knows this. Zekken dropping 40s in scrims has been a known fact for ages and they hard anti a lot of their strats. T1 teams actually have the resources and time to anti and prepare against players like zekken. SEN last year looked that good because they had another key factor besides zekken, TenZ, who was doing a lot of dirty work for them that helped zekken out by a lot. T1 has Meteor when Buzz can't entry, EDG has Smoggy, G2 has Jawgemo, but SEN rn looks like all they have is zekken and if he dies they are basically lost. The fact that N4RRATE looks uncomfy on initiator this year doesn't really help zekken so no wonder he can't play to his standards, but that is something they can work on in the future. S1mple was the best player in 2018 but astralis antid the fuck out of Navi and beat them 2-0 while making s1mple look miserable. No one was blaming s1mple for the loss cuz everyone knew he had it in him and he could still be the best player. Also, zekken is the type of player who does well on his own, without an IGL telling him what to do but giving more freedom to your starplayer isn't really thing/option in valorant. G2, VIT and T1 are the only teams that come to mind but they have the teamlay and strats to back it up. I think SEN is lacking that department and they could experiment with giving him more freedom like T1 does with Meteor. Zekkens problem might actually be that he's too disciplined to call for a play that he thinks is right, or high risk - high reward.
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