It’s officially official, now: Team Liquid has signed Michael ‘Grim’ Wince to take over for Captain ‘nitr0 America’, with the idea to bring about a bit more robust firepower in lieu of Nick’s IGL which has been taken over by Jake ‘Stewie2K’ Yip.
While Team Liquid has announced that the rumors were true well before the announcement, it’s never official until there are multiple TwitLongers.
While many presumed that things would settle as Grim gets used to the roster and team strategies, it’s apparently not in the cards: Team Liquid is dropping one more bombshell this week, and no one knows what it is yet.
Of course, when a team announces that they’re dropping another announcement, speculation begins.
Some are presuming that Team Liquid is a looking for a star AWPer to build the newest iteration of the roster around; a slot that admittedly has been missing from the NA team for some time; multiple players are competent on the AWP and have shown this in the past, but a dedicated sniper on the team could help bolster flagging showings.
Jonathan ‘EliGE’ Jablonowski seems to be welcoming Grim to the family on Twitter, and Jake is currently IGLing last we heard, which means both of them are likely safe from any further roster shake-ups.
Not counting how charismatic the two are for being the face of NA Counter-Strike at the moment.
This leaves two very unlikely candidates, presuming that we’re looking at another roster change in the immediate future; Keith ‘NAF’ Markovic and Russel ‘Twistzz’ van Dulken. Both are above 1.0 rating for the past three months according to HLTV, but NAF is slightly higher with 1.1 versus 1.06. Yet either of those two players leaving Liquid seems unreasonable at best.
They’re both young, and Russel continues to get better year after year, so age playing a factor doesn’t seem reasonable either: the average age within Team Liquid is 21.8 years of age.
This leaves the coaching staff, a sore point for some fans of the team as they have struggled in the past; the current coach is Eric ‘adreN’ Hoag, and he’s been coaching Team Liquid since 2018 when he hung up the mouse as a professional player. It’s possible that ‘adreN’ shifts to assistant coach and Liquid pick up a new head coach that can bring a bit more panache to the team. Or it’s a Valorant roster reveal, although that seems unlikely to gas up fans with in the same breath as Counter-Strike announcements.
Ultimately, whatever else Liquid has up their sleeve hasn’t been revealed as of yet, so it’s all baseless speculation until they do. It seems, however, rather likely that we’re looking at a staff change instead of a roster change, for whatever calm that can bring us as we wait.