During this past weekend’s ALGS Split 2 Playoffs, North American powerhouse NRG underperformed significantly. Though the squad’s in-game leader Christopher “sweetdreams” Sexton is often hailed as one of the best in the world, fellow NA IGL TSM’s Phillip “ImperialHal” Dosen placed the blame for NRG’s 11th place finish at this LAN squarely at his feet.
In a recent stream clipped by Twitch user deathintheandes, Hal bluntly laid out exactly what he thought sweet did wrong as an IGL during the last match of the 2023 Split Two Playoffs finals:
“I know Gild threw that game, but putting your teammate—Gild, right?—on Horizon in the middle of LAN finals when he does not play Horizon; like what did you expect, honestly?”
Hal is referring to NRG’s Zachary “Gild” Dennis. He joined NRG in August of last year, and many viewed him as the final component the squad of sweetdreams and Nathan “Nafen” Nguyen needed to start winning trophies. After Gild joined, NRG took second place at the 2023 Split One Playoffs, supporting this thinking. We even had Gild as one of our players to watch going into this event.
But the Split Two Playoffs final were a different story. NRG never even managed to reach the 50 point match-point threshold necessary to have a chance at winning the event, finishing the finals with 41 points. For their own part, NRG cited changes to Ring Console spawns in their landing POI, Staging, as one of the main reasons for their struggles.
From Hal’s perspective, NRG should have won this tournament’s final endgame, pushing the finals to another match, but didn’t because sweet put Gild on Horizon during the finals despite the fact that the young gun doesn’t have much Horizon experience in the current competitive meta, if any at all. Beyond that, according to the TSM IGL, NRG don’t play in scrims, leaving Gild unprepared to take on other legends in a tournament environment.
“You just put your teammate on a character he never plays,” ImperialHal says in the clip.
“He doesn’t play scrims because of sweet. ‘I’m sweetdreams, I am putting my teammate on a character that they have no experience on and expect them to play well,’ because you don’t want to play scrim,” Hal continues. “And you can’t even blame Gild. Like obviously it looks stupid as fuck what Gild did, but Gild has literally—he doesn’t have experience playing this character in a competitive setting, especially in an endgame, because you don’t play fucking scrims.”
Considering the fact that Hal and TSM took second place in the Split Two Playoffs, he may have the high ground when it comes to criticizing his fellow IGLs and how they use their teammates.
