Are Legacy downgrading with their move for try?

They say that sometimes you have to take a step back to go two steps forward.

Legacy better hope they go two steps forward after picking up try.

Look, we quite like try. He’s a decent enough player with a high ceiling but not a great floor. He can be great, but a lot of the time he quite simply isn’t that good, and the data shows he was a pretty average player during his time on, albeit a pretty dysfunctional, Passion UA.

A year ago, we might have been totally on board with removing saadzin for try; saadzin had not showed much ability to climb above his middling level and try for his faults at least has high peaks. But what makes this move all the more confounding is that saadzin seemed to finally make ‘The Leap’ in the last few months and became a genuinely decent AWPer who could do more than simply exist within the server.

He’s by no means the best AWPer in the world, but he was beginning to look like a tier one AWPer and was definitely not holding this team back.

This makes the move one that our model really does not like, and to be quite honest, neither do we. try has had some high highs, but his consistent level over a full six months has pretty much never been as good as saadzin’s has just been, at least at the top level.

If it wasn’t obvious, we think this is a downgrade. Legacy were a team able to win events, bizarrely, and peak in big tournaments and take big names, and we think this change is an unnecessary one that only changes things for the sake of change, just as they were going well.

To play Devil’s Advocate, though, we don’t entirely despise it. While everything above we said is true, saadzin was pretty average for a long time and this purple patch doesn’t mean he’s necessarily fixed. If saadzin can perform in this system, who is to say try can’t? Legacy seem to do weird things to their players and get them to peak intermittently but aggressively, somehow.

Legacy aren’t exactly a stable top ten team, and so they might as well double down on a guy who is a bit of a gamble. You have to take some risks if you want to break the glass ceiling, and maybe this is try’s time to finally fulfill that potential that he so clearly possesses.

We just… sort of doubt it. To the eye, saadzin seemed to fix some of his issues. He became more responsible, taking the game by the scruff of the neck and making things happen instead of letting them happen. He’s not some mechanical demon, but he’s sound enough and clever enough to get the best of most tier two AWPers. He holds his own at tier one, and we’re just not sure try does most of the time.

try is more explosive, but Legacy don’t need more craziness.

saadzin was quite often the guy holding things together when they went wrong, and we just don’t see try fulfilling that role. saadzin is far more comfortable being passive and throwing util, which try will have to learn as someone has to do it on this team of lunatics, and act like HEN1 did on FURIA when arT used to use himself as a flashbang.

The AWPer on arT’s teams are usually safety nets rather than playmakers, and saadzin had become accustomed to and quite decent at it. Now they have to start all over again and hope try is better, and we’re just not sure he is.

We’d love to be wrong, because Legacy are an interesting team who are one of few underdogs actually capable of upsetting the applecart at an event without wilting away like MOUZ, and try is a guy who can be seriously fun to watch - it’s just that this move feels like one driven by the heart rather than the head.