Winners & Losers: XSE Pro League playoffs

The XSE Pro League final concluded today, with 9z taking the trophy home in dominant fashion.

The South Americans will be the happiest team heading home this week, but they won’t be the only ones smiling. With the odd timing of this event, this was more of a proving ground for some of these teams. You can’t really say, in good faith, that FaZe had the same expectations as 9z, for instance.

With that in mind, we decided to look at the playoff teams with context in mind to see who walked away from XPL happiest.

Starting off with the obvious:

Winner - 9z

The actual winners are winners, obviously.

Aside from walking away with the trophy, 9z will be pretty happy with their overall performance. They might have dropped a few maps here and there, but they kept chugging and closing out. Sweeping the finals 3:0 will be a nice bonus for them as well.

It’s almost kind of funny that 9z dropped maps to all the teams far below them, but PARIVISION, who are legitimately good, couldn’t get one.

There’s good reason for that: 9z’s stars struggle massively with consistency and regularly drop substandard maps. Still, between the Major and this, they’re clearly good enough to be in the Aurora group of tier-1 teams. Unfortunately, that means you eventually have to make moves to become better, like Aurora did this off-season.

For now, none of that matters; this is a great win for 9z, who now have a nice cushion in the VRS department.

Loser - BetBoom

They were better with FL4MUS.

After a very good group stage, we were pretty high on BetBoom; hell, we even went as far as to say no one on FaZe could keep up with Magnojez when he’s firing. And maybe we were right; we’d never know, since Magnojez never arrived against FaZe. Don’t let his map 2 rating deceive you; there’s a reason they got run over.

Are we being harsh on Magnojez? Absolutely, we’re just addressing the star first.

Clearly BetBoom had bigger issues given that jcobbb, FaZe’s worst player, still had a better swing than 4/5 of BB’s quad. S1ren was especially poor, managing 11 kills and 30 deaths in 34 rounds across both maps. At risk of sounding cruel, it’s no wonder BetBoom tried to sign FL4MUS permanently.

VP’s outrageous buyout demand might end up costing BetBoom far more in the long run, because if this is the level they’re playing at for the foreseeable future, it’s going to be a long season.

Winner - PARIVISION

New roster, new finals.

Sure, they would have liked to win this event, but you can’t be mad at making the finals. Especially considering this is their first event with HObbit, and more importantly, slaxejezzz. The latter is a complete rookie, with serious baggage, so the fact he helped his team make the finals on their first time of asking is impressive.

And yes, the finals could’ve gone better.

No one is ever happy about losing 0:3 in a best-of-five. But with Jame playing one of his worst series in recent memories, it was always going to be an uphill battle. It’d be more concerning if we saw Jame, xIELo, and slaxejezzz playing well leading to a loss. At least now there’s still a pathway to growth.

The VRS points for making the finals won't hurt either.

Loser - BIG

The Germans seem to be stuck in a time loop.

No matter what they do, BIG are permanently nearly men. Nearly tier 1, nearly good, nearly the best team in tier 2. Every change leads them back to being kind of okay, beating bad teams, struggling to be great.

This roster is just another example.

The floor for everyone on their team is simply too low. JDC, tabseN, gr1ks, even blameF to an extent, all of these guys are really good players with great moments. But the lows are too low, and they hit them too often. You can’t have series where none of you show up; it’s just not allowed if you want to be competitive in this circuit.

Against PARIVISION, the only person on BIG with a positive rating was faveN, the guy with arguably the lowest expectations.

Bring back Krimbo, cancel JBOEN’s loan to FaZe, beg gob b to return and fix things. We don’t know, just do something. This era of BIG must be boring their fans now, surely.

Who are we kidding? 100 more years of tabseN IGLing and being between #30 and #20 ITW are on their way.

?????? - FaZe Clan

We were torn on how to judge FaZe for this one.

On the one hand, they did great with a new roster. JBOEN showed real promise; they reached the semi-finals and earned VRS points. The game they lost was a close battle that could’ve gone either way, as they had several map points to close it out. Those are all pretty good, so we’re pointed towards winners.

But then you dig into it for a minute.

jcobbb has continued to prove that he’s probably not good enough, despite being moved into secondary star roles. There were some clear blunders and protocol errors in FaZe’s game that need addressing, making it hard to leave with too much positive to say about Twistzz’s IGLing. Plus, PARIVISION were there for the taking; you can spin it as a positive that it was close, but FaZe made those games difficult for themselves. So you can see how we ended up here, because both sides of the argument are a bit flawed. They’re too harsh and don't really cover the whole story.

We don’t even know if Neityu is their permanent fifth yet. You’d assume so, especially because he did pretty well relative to his roles, but that’s still just a rumor at this point. There is even talk that they might still replace jcobbb this offseason, which feels more like fanfiction, but is a real rumor I heard.

With as many questions as they have, you can’t put FaZe in either camp.

At least their VRS points actually went up. That feels like a first.