Aleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev was labelled as the best player in the world by HLTV for 2018 despite of missing out on quite a few important trophies. The Ukrainian has dropped match winning performance across the year for Natus Vincere, which alone was enough for him to earn such an honorable title.
Besides his stature as the best, he is also knowing for grinding out matches for NaVi single handedly on multiple occasions. The teams competing might not boast the firepower that NaVi carry under the hood but they still manage to get the better of them. NaVi went through quite a few roster changes this year, benching Ioann ‘Edward’ Sukhariev and picking up Kirill ‘Boombl4’ Mikhailov, who we later see take up the IGL role as Danylo ‘Zeus’ Teslenko hang up his mouse.
In picture posted on reddit, we see a graph of s1mple’s impact rating across the year and the highlighted point is when he gave up the AWP to GuardiaN after his signing.
It is far obvious that s1mple’s impact has fallen off without the big green. The blame can somewhat be shared between GuardiaN and Boombl4. GuardiaN’s decline was evident from his showings in early 2019 with FaZe, more often than not GuradiaN was nothing but a shadow of his former self. Boombl4 on the other hand was pushed down into the IGL role, and the 21 year old might shine individually but there is time before he grows into a leader.
A quick take away from the graph being that the worst impact rating on LAN from s1mple came after GuardiaN joined them. Ducan ‘Thoorin’ Shields in his YouTube show Thorin’s Thoughts went to the extent to say that he would rather chose any decent rifler from CIS region to replace the Slovak and get the AWP back in the hands of s1mple.
