Oh right I’m braindead

Aspas is a good player, but the way NRG shut him down was insane. FNS knows what he’s doing and Saadhak clearly can’t keep up. Plus, multiple teams, including the likes of Sentinels and KRU, came so close to shutting out LOUD. Everyone saw how marved sat most of LOUD’s roster that day after coming from the bench. It’s not off the rails insane to think that stronger teams (especially the one who would have beaten LOUD at lock in had it not been for some absurdly lucky situations in an overtime nailbiter) would beat them. LOUD’s last really good win was against FURIA ages ago. Also C9 is fake asf that isn’t real

Not really, after seeing C9 almost get shocked by an 0-8 team in KRU and LOUD losing 2-0 to NRG. Sure, won’t be an “easy” game, like if FNC faced KCORP, but NRG easily have the power to come out on top in either of those series. It cannot be denied that NRG have shown their contention for the top team in americas.

1st Hot take: NRG are easily the top team in NA. They have world class champions-caliber players, a great coach who took the former optic crew to 2nd place at champions, and sweeped LOUD dominantly last week. As far as I’m concerned, NRG can easily beat C9 and LOUD and has stomped most of the teams in Americas already.
2nd Hot take: Sentinels can be better than most teams in the playoffs. Sentinels has the same story has NRG, minus the coaching staff (because wtf happened to sykko) and if they stopped fucking with their roster then maybe they can cause some serious damage. We saw the capability of the team when they almost closed it out against LOUD, and if TenZ manages to not fuck up his finger, they can win some games.

Feel free to bully me for the take Idrc.

You guys don’t understand this. TenZ is the face of both Valorant and sentinels. Just having his presence on a team makes loads of money. TenZ himself isn’t as cracked of a player as Asia’s anymore, but sentinels isn’t gonna drop him. He is the only reason their team is in franchising, if they drop him nobody is gonna wanna watch sentinels anymore. At least, not nearly as many people as the TenZ fanboys. It’s not about his skill, it’s about how much money he can make the team. He’s not going anywhere anytime soon. And you guys need to remember that there are a lot of personal reasons why he could get benched. He might just be incredibly exhausted. We all know he’s had a finger injury, he had Covid not too long ago, and his fiancée has leukemia. So it’s safe to say that he is benched for personal reasons.