Team Spirit Beats FaZe To Take Home IEM Katowice Trophy
Team Spirit dominated FaZe in the Grand Finals, with a 3-0 sweep, with their young superstar player Danil “donk” Kryshkovets being unstoppable in every map played.
Donk easily secured the HLTV MVP Award with an overall rating of 1.70 and his overall performance was the greatest debut at any big event since Nikola “NiKo” Kovač at ESL One New York 2017. Donk’s dominating performance has already popularized the term in the community of "Getting Donked,” and Spirit’s support has rose throughout every stage of the event. Spirit jumped eight spots in the HLTV World Ranking to now be ranked the third best team in the world.
Team Spirit faced off against Team Falcons in the semi-finals who were coming off a close victory over the hometown team ENCE. Spirit would absolutely dominate Falcons, 2-0, only allowing Falcons to win 11 rounds in total over the entire two map series. Team Spirit only lost one map the entire event against Natus Vincere in the Group Stage going on to completely sweep every team in their way the rest of the event.
FaZe breezed through the event with their only two losses both coming against Team Spirit where they were swept both times. FaZe would sweep both their opponents on the grand stage beating both G2 and MOUZ, two teams that had very solid events of their own.
On the first map Nuke, Spirit won the map 13-9 with Donk being on top of the leaderboard finishing with 32 kills, 10 more kills than the next closest player on either team. His final rating was a 2.06 with the rating system being out of 2.0 meaning he exceeded the highest rating a player can receive.
The second map Mirage was the closest out of the three maps played in the final series with Spirit winning narrowly 13-11. Donk finished the map with a 1.55 rating and 24 kills and his teammate Dmitry “sh1ro” Sokolov former AWP player for Cloud9 finished with a 1.26 rating and 20 kills to help secure the victory.
The final map Overpass was an absolute slaughter with Spirit taking home the IEM Katowice 2024 trophy with a dominating 13-3 map victory. Donk finished with an astounding 2.38 rating and 26 kills which was 11 more kills then the next closest person being his teammate sh1ro.