NaVi Were the Most Dominant Force at IEM Cologne

Yesterday, the Intel Extreme Masters found an unceremonious conclusion. For fans of the CIS team, they were a great success. But the rest of the viewers only got to see a somewhat disappointing Grand Finals. This speaks volumes on the dominance on the part of Natus Vincere.

After all, Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev and his team raced ahead of the other teams by quite a margin. In the end, the Ukrainian delivered a 1.51 average rating – an incredible achievement for the first LAN tournament since 2020!

NAVI IN GROUP B

Their dominance already started in the Group Stage. While Renegades hit them with an upset on the first map of the Opening Match, NaVi then pulled through to an effortless 2-1 finish. On Dust2 and Nuke, the Australians barely scraped together 10 rounds combined. After that, Natus Vincere had to go up against Team Vitality, who narrowly mounted a 16-14 victory on the first map. Once again, the players stood with their backs against the wall, but quickly stabilized. On Nuke and Mirage, they proved to be miles ahead of Vitality.

As a last Group Stage hurdle, Astralis stood in the way of the Semi Finals. Starting off at the LAN event, the Danes had quickly gained momentum. Suddenly, they were serious contenders and even without Nicolai “device” Reedtz, they had a shot at taking down the CIS roter. However, s1mple and his men quickly held a 16-7 victory on Ancient.

On Dust2, the Danes finally rose up to the challenge. Andreas “Xyp9x” Højsleth had to clutch versus three to keep them in the match. But when Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander then added another 1v3 clutch to the list, the underdogs managed to score a narrow 22-19 win. Despite the overpowered performance on the part of s1mple, NaVi were forced onto a third map.

This one went even quicker than Ancient. No Astralis player managed to contend with s1mple and Valeriy “B1T” Vakhovskiy, as the two quickly secured a 16-5 finish for their team. So Natus Vincere got the Semi Finals slot and could make themselves comfortable there.

NAVI IN THE PLAYOFFS

They had surely expected to see Gambit rise from the Quarter Finals. Instead, they were met with a resurgent FaZe Clan, the arguably biggest underdog in the entire bracket. Not a problem for the CIS team, as they held the victory after two quick maps and thus entered the Grand Finals. FaZe weren’t even a match and gave NaVi their quickest match in the entire tournament. Even though reaching the Semi Finals was already a success for the team, this was just more proof of NaVi being primed for the trophy.

So on they went into the last game of the event. The Best-of-Five took place against G2 Esports – a fitting conclusion to the first LAN event since the start of the pandemic. After all, it was G2 and NaVi who had played the last offline finals at IEM Katowice 2020.

AN UNDERWHELMING GRAND FINALS

The 3-0 score doesn’t tell the full story. G2 didn’t leave the Grand Finals uncontested, but the close scorelines on the last two maps also didn’t tell the full story. From start to end, Natus Vincere were almost always in the lead. If G2 won a round, it was mostly down to individual moments or brutal rushes that could have gone either way. But when NaVi won rounds, the majority of the team survived and often, G2 failed to even penetrate the defense.

So even though G2 came close to victory on 13-16 and 14-16 scorelines, the match was largely led by Natus Vincere. In the meantime, s1mple broke a record for most aces (4!) at a large offline event. Nikola ‘NiKo’ Kovač was the only player on the G2 camp to even come close. But even he was outmatched by s1mple and B1T. The individual performances out of the NaVi players were astonishing.

S1MPLE AND… B1T?

IEM Cologne has shown one thing: The younglings are lacking LAN experience. It still matters whether a player has 30 or 300 offline maps on record. The newest acquisitions from NiP or Vitality have shown weakness, even Gambit failed to meet their previous level and were tactically outplayed by seasoned veterans. Of course it’s only a matter of time until they have that experience, but nonetheless the veterans have a head start in that regard – with the notable exception of B1T.

Considering that the Ukrainian was pulled from the Natus Vincere academy roster just a few months ago, he’s on par with the elite to an impressive degree. The Grand Finals were just another example for that. A 1.27 rating versus NiKo?!

On average, he managed to place ahead of Dmitry “sh1ro” Sokolov and just shy of Denis “electronic” Sharipov. Maybe the overall strong team performance lifted him up somewhat, but this performance is going to give him confidence and will help him become a LAN monster before any of the other youngsters do.

NaVi can now lay back for a little while. The last trophy before the pandemic and the first trophy after the return to LAN are theirs. The summer break is waiting for them. However, they can’t rest easy on their accomplishments forever. The other teams will want to find out what went wrong during IEM Cologne. At the next big event, Natus Vincere will be facing a large number of hungry teams wanting to even the score. It remains to be seen whether the CIS roster will still be up for the challenge then.