If oSee doesn’t smash it on Liquid, NA is screwed

Sometimes my takes are scalding hot, and sometimes they’re just at that nice temperature where it doesn’t burn your mouth but it still keeps you nice and warm on a cold winter’s night.

This one is more the latter, but it’s something that has kind of flown under the radar with news that oSee might be stepping up to Liquid. If it doesn’t work, NA is absolutely done for; for three main reasons.

Liquid will be scared off

Team Liquid keep making noises complaining that the NA talent pool is too shallow and that the players are untested and too raw at the top level (ignoring that all rookies are untested and raw, and that the main reason there’s no good teams for them to practice against is because Liquid themselves do not spend any time playing against them).

oSee IS battle-hardened, and has some experience at being at a higher level than he is currently; so if he doesn’t translate his level to tier one competition, there’s no way Liquid will ever try to take the best from their own region again. Hell, they took Grim and then ruined him, and appear to be using that as their justification for NA talent just not being there.

If there’s no path to Team Liquid, NA CS will die off, obviously. Why would young American players stay in CS if there’s one good team in the region (and good is a stretch) with Extra Salt as a potentially good tier 2 team? You can go to some terrible VALORANT team and get paid, or grind it out for one of the 10 salaried spots in NA with no room for growth.

Yay!

Pic unrelated.

oSee is clearly better than other NA players

If it turns out oSee is a bit crap, then that really paints the rest of NA in a horrible, horrible light – ’cause he has been smurfing on them for a long time now.

What does it tell you about the other American teams if the guy who absolutely crushes them over and over again can’t find impact against decent EU teams? If he’s not particularly good for Team Liquid, and not an improvement on what they have, then they’ll be proven right in looking to import, because NA CS must be awful.

We’ve seen junior struggle with the step-up (admittedly with extraneous circumstances beyond his control, but that’s not necessarily what potential buyers will see) already, and if oSee follows a simple path, it becomes far to easy to draw sweeping conclusions.

For what it’s worth, I think oSee will easily make the step up and look like a solid player at the top level; but if he doesn’t, Bad News Bears, Triumph and co. have a lot to answer for. 

No pressure, Josh. Just the whole region waiting with bated breath.

NA’s best team will not even be very good any more

Team Liquid are really banking on oSee being a key fragger for this team.

shox and nitr0 with their combined age of 75 (or something like that, I can’t be bothered to look it up) and similarly poor fragging output (probably) aren’t going to be doing any heavy lifting, and while ELiGE and NAF are great players, they aren’t enough on their own. I mean, obviously.

Every great team has a great AWPer right now, and half of the top 20 players are probably AWPers. So it stands to reason, then, that if Liquid want to be a great team, oSee must translate his huge ratings almost directly into the tier one tournaments. If oSee is even mildly underwhelming, Liquid won’t be very good, because they’re already going to struggle for firepower as is.

If NA’s best team is bad, and oSee’s performance shows us that the rest of NA is absolutely MIBR’d, then I’m sorry, but NA CS is dead and buried.

No pressure, Josh. Just the whole region waiting with bated breath.