B1ad3: "Trust the process"
B1ad3 says NAVI "haven't changed anything", but their improved performance comes from better execution of the playbook.
Navi lost to Vitality in the PGL quarterfinals, but their run in Romania earned them their first playoff spot since winning IEM Atlanta, with important wins over Spirit and FURIA.
B1ad3 told HLTV after the team was eliminated that they don't need to change anything to see progress. "We've been doing the same things," he said. "It's just that the sharpness in executing protocols and ideas wasn't there, because it might be about mindset, it might be about confidence, right? Because everything we have is there."
Fresh off a top-eight finish in Bucharest, B1ad3 spoke with HLTV in depth about their tournament run and the reasons behind their early-season struggles and recent improvement.
Q: So first of all, commiserations. Let's talk through that series from start to finish. Cache is obviously a very, very good map for you guys. Why do you think you are so successful on Cache?
A: We prepared a lot, but we couldn't pick it because, for instance, we haven't played it for a while. If you focused on other maps for the first two days, you need to trust basically what you've grinded elsewhere because you already did it on the last day. So yes, we really just kept up with the meta, studied the meta, analyzed, and upgraded our knowledge on this map. We also played it yesterday. We felt really good about it, so that's why we picked it.
Q: Did you hesitate at all to pick it against Vitality, who are also very strong on Cache? Or were you still confident?
A: I checked how they played Cache before, they play a bit FACEIT-style on the T side. Not much structure. People just roam around trying to get kills, looking for openers, if you don't stop them firepower-wise, you'll lose a lot of duels, and if you pick this map, it's going to be really hard on the CT side. But we felt pretty confident on CT against Spirit yesterday, and that gave us confidence. Yesterday's CT side against Spirit was really good. I think we were 8-4, 9-3 or something like that. So that's why we were ready and made some plays today.
We know how they play. For example, we push B, kill ropz and ZywOo. And obviously we know we'll start on the T side, and the T side is dominant on this map. This is also part of the plan, because when they pick it and we start on the CT side, they can feel confident and make game plans, which is why we removed it last time against them.
Q: Obviously the next two maps didn't go as well. Where do you think things went wrong on Mirage and Dust2?
A: I think we had chances on both maps, but once you give Vitality that kind of confidence boost or economy boost, they start playing rounds with more random plays, people can just guess for kills, just YOLO. They really don't overthink it. If you look at how ZywOo plays, sometimes he pushes on CT side, dies alone. We basically need to punish them.
This is why, for example on Mirage, we were not as locked in as we were yesterday on the CT side against Spirit. We weren't fighting together. Against a team like this, you need 5% more, 10% more clarity, 10% more synergy, a lot of communication, your brain has to be running at full speed. And I don't know, the energy dropped there. I don't know why. I felt it very clearly on the CT side.
I know how we can play, how we usually talk about those duels. We played the late-round setups really poorly. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but even the B rounds they won were 5v3 or 4v2. You just need more communication, don't rush, that's what I'm seeing, the energy dropped, we're not that active. We're not that sharp with our coordination.
Everyone tried to get kills one by one, but Vitality excels at that. When you try to kill them, they can also have good individual plays and firepower. So definitely, the CT side was our main problem on Mirage, because I think it could have been 8-4, 9-3.
Same on the T side, we weren't ourselves. They played well, but we need to figure out how to activate this mode in our team, when we're more locked in, more in reactive mode, sharper with each other, in good positions late in rounds, and not letting them get multi-kills.
We also had good situations on the T side of Mirage. Sometimes we froze on A and didn't take space. There were also some even rounds, 3v2, 2v2, and that's when we struggled. That's one of the things we have to improve and work on.
Q: But overall, the whole tournament felt like a better version of NAVI than we've seen in months. What is your assessment of the whole tournament?
A: We were already switched on in EPL, we had a very good tournament in EPL. Pretty clean 2-0s against 9z and G2, I mean pretty confident. It had already shown us, to ourselves, that this is a different team. We took a map off Vitality, a map off Falcons. We're still struggling, but we've already seen we're heading in the right direction, we're a different team.
The match against PARIVISION was a complete disaster in my opinion, because we should have beaten them, we knew how to beat them, but we started to hesitate, got nervous, and were afraid of losing, and in the end they just played their own style and beat us.
That was... For example, I saw that we already played really well against 9z, against G2 and other teams, I saw how we can play, and we didn't do that against PARIVISION. It's strange, because this isn't a team with very strong star players who can make you slip just because of who they are. So that was a bit of a sloppy situation, because in a way it set us back a step. We thought it would be: play at Spodek, give us more confidence.
And then we carried that same understanding into this tournament, that we can compete against strong teams. We're playing much better now, and we've basically proven that here. We had very tough opponents. We had G2, FURIA, Spirit, Vitality. BETBOOM played really well, but, I don't know, I feel we could have beaten BETBOOM as well. They're in really good form right now. They did really good things on the maps, moving as a team, great firepower. They're pretty much even on a lot of maps.
So it was a tough opponent, but I still think, once again, if you compare the BETBOOM and PARIVISION games, for me the problem is somewhat the same, because we didn't play our own game. Where we could have won, we usually didn't. We stalled again, or became stiff and static, while they did the opposite. That's an important skill.
So we can always learn from our mistakes. We can use matches to analyze our progress, weaknesses and strengths. You can already see what we need to improve. So these losses are very helpful for us, like against BETBOOM and PARI. And against Vita, I think, like I said, if you give them too much confidence, they are a different team.
Q: What do you think is the biggest difference you have seen in your improvement? Can you point out what in the matches has improved for you in the EPL and now compared to the start of the season?
A: We didn't change anything, we've been doing the same thing all along. It's just that the sharpness in executing protocols and ideas wasn't enough, because it might be related to mindset, might be related to confidence, right? Because everything we have is all there. We play seven maps. The veto at this event was very good, we did something completely unexpected. We basically just upgraded our knowledge and kept doing the same thing. It's a bit like keep trying until you activate, because if you're losing, you always need to improve.
The main problem is if you don't improve, if you're thinking, you're desperate, you're frustrated, you don't believe in anything. But that's the point, that's the reality: you're gaining some knowledge, trying to use this knowledge in matches. If it doesn't work, you just fix it, instead of... basically be realistic. I think maybe that would help us a lot, just to persist, like people say, trust the process, right? Basically just trust the process, keep improving, improving, improving.
One thing that definitely helped us a lot was winning. Because when you don't play much and you're losing, you start to hesitate, that's how you think. So yes, winning is very important. In the EPL when we started winning, everyone fought for those wins, and that helped us a lot.