Team Liquid bench cadiaN, What is the next move for the Organization
Team Liquid announced the benching of their Danish in-game leader (IGL) and AWPer Casper “cadiaN” Møller on Monday after the start of the player break. According to HLTV, Liquid was already weighing their options with the Danish captain ahead of the start of IEM Dallas this year. Liquid would look like an improved team at Dallas barely missing out on reaching the main stage by losing to G2 in the lower bracket final.
The decision has not gone over well with the fans of Liquid with the reception of the move being split on if the move is good or not. Many fans feel that most of the blame was put onto cadiaN’s shoulders while other members of the team underperformed during the season.
CadiaN joined the team in December 2023 while Liquid was going into a rebuild after losing two of their longest tenured players in Nick “nitr0” Cannella to retirement and Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski to Complexity. Liquid would also release their long-time AWPer in Josh “oSee” Ohm to make room for cadiaN’s pick up. The team would pick up star rifler Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken from FaZe and Felipe “skullz” Medeiros from paiN Gaming. This rounded out the roster which consisted of Keith “NAF” Markovic, Mareks “YEKINDAR” Gaļinskis, Twistzz, skullz, and cadiaN making Liquid look ready to become the next super team in the North American (NA) region.
However the ambitions of this team would not come to fruition, and throughout the season the team would continue to disappoint fans with their lackluster finishes and poor placements in events. From losing in the RMRs to not make the Copenhagen major to being knocked out of events like BLAST Spring Showdown 2024 and IEM Chengdu early on.
It has become clear that the team was not meshing well with cadiaN’s system he was trying to implement as IGL. However, to put all the blame on cadiaN is counter intuitive to Liquid hoping to build a solid top 10 roster.
The question now becomes what the next steps for Liquid is to create a consistently competitive roster. It seems that FURIA is in the works of transferring skullz to their squad to round out their Brazilian squad. Fans have pointed out that the play of skullz and YEKINDAR have both fallen off a cliff during this season, and it becomes pretty clear if you watch YEKINDAR play last year compared to this new roster. It seems that the team is going to give YEKINDAR one more chance based on his performance during IEM Dallas where he showed flashes of the YEKINDAR that Liquid signed from Virtus.pro back in 2022.
If Liquid wishes to remain an international roster then they have some good options depending on what kind of player they are looking for. If we go into this scenario with the team losing skullz to FURIA then it may be a possibility for Liquid to get another Brazilian rifler from the same organization in Kaike “KSCERATO” Cerato who still has not renewed his contract with FURIA. The IGL role unfortunately is much harder to replace with one of the biggest downfalls of the NA region being their lack of star power at the IGL role. When Liquid released cadiaN, not only did they get rid of their IGL but also lost their AWPer as well meaning they need to replace both roles in one or try the Cloud9 route and have only riflers on the team which did not work out very well for Cloud9. Now that Dust 2 is back in the map pool it has become even more important than ever to have a solid AWP player as Dust 2 is heavily sided toward the team with the better AWP player. If they leaned toward picking up a dedicated AWPer then a good signing could be Olek “hades” Miskiewicz from ENCE and then focusing their replacement for skullz as a dedicated IGL. A common fan theory is that the team will look to pick up recent IEM Dallas winner Jake “Stewie2K” Yip even with a middle of the road performance at IEM Dalls it seems that Stewie2K wants to put his hat back into the ring of professional Counter-Strike.
It will be an interesting month to see where Liquid now take this team as their next event is not until late July when they compete at the BLAST Fall Groups 2024.
