Why w0nderful might just have been the MVP of ESL Pro League S23

w0nderful put up a performance for the ages to drag NAVI to a narrative-breaking trophy and rip the race for… well, second best team in the world wide open.

While the official MVP went to makazze, we’d like to make the case for why w0nderful was the ‘real’ MVP of ESL Pro League S23.

makazze was absolutely brilliant throughout the tournament and is in no way an undeserved winner, it’s just that w0nderful’s grand final showing was out of this world good. Unprecedentedly, at least for most players, good.

While it’s fair to not just judge the grand final when taking MVP into account, we do believe it should be weighted higher than it is. The final should be the hardest, highest pressure game, and performing in it should be considered more impressive. It’s not the be all and end all, but it’s a pretty big part of deciding who the ‘most valuable player’ was, because without winning the final, what were you valuable towards?

Regardless, let’s dive into some numbers.

Throughout the event, it’s pretty obvious why makazze took the award.

makazze’s ridiculously high duel swing (150% is elite, top 5 player in the world level over a longer period of time) immediately makes him pop on the graph, and that his round swing somewhat aligns shows he wasn’t just doing it for show either. He was winning difficult duels, winning a lot of duels, and having massive impact on rounds.

This is not an article to talk about why makazze’s impact was overrated, in the slightest. Over the length of the tournament he was undoubtedly NAVI’s best player. It’s just that smacking MongolZ in a quarter-final or Monte in a group stage doesn’t really matter as much as carrying a team to victory in a grand final.

This is just the grand final in isolation.

Don’t be too alarmed, makazze’s duel swing has actually barely moved, despite its new position on the graph. It’s just that w0nderful has broken the graph a bit.

250% duel swing is something ZywOo does to a mid-tier team with ideas above their station, not what w0nderful usually does to a team around the same level as them in a grand final. 90ish% round swing is pretty much ZywOo level, too.

w0nderful, in the biggest moment of the event, turned into ZywOo, which is particularly shocking given this is how he normally stacks up.

That’s a level up and a half, and while Aurora aren’t a top 4 team in the world (unless one REALLY thinks MOUZ and Spirit are giga-cooked), they’re no mugs either. w0nderful over the last three events has been a net positive but about average AWPer, and then at EPL was clearly above average, and then in the final just turned into the Sun God from Bloons TD. Just beaming people from across the map, constantly.

That rocketed up his general performance over the event too - with him posting the third highest duel swing of AWPers at the event. This kinda suggests he’s not being played around to the extent he’s getting super easy duels in key situations, because his round swing isn’t that high to match.

That's a generous interpretation; the stat man amongst us reckons it could just as likely him getting 'empty calories' - low impact statpadding kills. They were still tough duels, though.

He’s hitting shots like an elite AWPer, but not necessarily had the impact of one - which is likely partially due to team effects. NAVI are a rifle-forward team, unlike Spirit (where sh1ro is given a lot of room, alongside donk, perhaps to the detriment of the other players) or a team like FURIA.

To his right, having more impact by the numbers, is phzy and Jame, who both are given a lot of room by their respective teams. Jame, obviously, given that room by himself. How generous. w0nderful isn’t given as much, but still put up a very solid, reliable performance (which perhaps goes against the narrative a little) until the final.

Above w0nderful, who is somehow putting up even crazier duel swing with similar space, is nqz, who had a terrific tournament. He does get the AWP quite a bit more than w0nderful, though, which helps.

What we’re getting at, is that w0nderful was, and maybe is, quite underrated with what he does with not too much.

sh1ro, by the way, was top right in the first graph, yet bottom left in this one. Ghoulish. They didn’t even get out of the quarters!

That’s all without getting into the ‘raw’ numbers, as it were. w0nderful’s grand final performance was astonishing even then. His 82 kill haul was 19 kills more than anyone else, and included 21 multikill rounds, an absurd seven clutches and a 12-2 scoreline in opening duels.

For reference on how insane that seven clutches in a series is, only five players achieved more than that in the entirety of PGL Cluj-Napoca. ZywOo had three in three maps in the grand final, and one in the grand final of IEM Krakow. It’s over a third of all of his won clutches this year!

These are insane numbers, and match up to his incredible duel swing. His grand final performance was out of this world. We cannot stress this enough.

Giving the MVP to makazze is a perfectly fine choice. He was the best player at the event for the whole tournament, but w0nderful was very solid throughout, and so impossibly good in the biggest game of the event (both metaphorically and literally - it was four maps) that we think there’s more than just ‘an argument for’ him winning it.

So, how good is w0nderful?

That’s a very difficult question to answer. We’ve been discussing internally and come to the conclusion that… we don’t know. He’s probably a top 10 AWPer, but putting him top 5 seems a little too high.

That said, the difference between the top three and the rest is so large that relatively, the gap between w0nderful and, say, molodoy (bizarrely) is miniscule. Even though the numbers don’t look too good for molodoy, it’s worth remembering this is only for a few events this year and there’s some team effects in there too. FURIA have struggled in 2026, and this is likely to affect the numbers somewhat (albeit duel swing is relatively team performance resistant).

Hasn’t done much to sh1ro’s numbers, though.

He’s less played around than most of the AWPers in the top 10, though he’s not massively supportive with utility either. He’s sort of a lurking AWPer, which is why he ends up in so many clutches. If, and it’s a big if, we see more of that grand final w0nderful, or at least Copenhagen Major w0nderful, then he’s in with a shout at that elusive 5th spot that torzsi currently resides in.

For now, we have him around 6-9th in the world - but CS is fluid and things change very, very quickly.