friberg: Probably the best on Nuke

Ninjas in Pyjamas bounced back from a bad start, losing 16-6 to G2 on Inferno, and picked up two consecutive wins to go 2-1 up in the group stage of SL i-League StarSeries Season 3.

In an interview with HLTV.org, Adam "⁠friberg⁠" Friberg talked about Jacob "⁠pyth⁠" Mourujärvi's departure, playing against MVP Project and his team's struggles against the double AWP on Inferno.

Let's start with the draken pickup. From what we heard, THREAT had a big impact on deciding who you were going to add to the team. At the time, did you know how you wanted to use draken and did anything change since he joined?

I wasn't that involved in the process of replacing pyth, I think it was more from the management than from the players. Because, we didn't get the results that we wanted, so it was more of a management decision [to replace pyth].

I mean, if we would pick up anyone it would probably be [draken], because he is the player we are kind of missing in our team. We were missing an AWPer and I think he fills the role very good, we've been too passive on CT because we can't go for picks without an AWP. I think he fills the role very well, doing what we want from him, he is taking a lot of initiative and things like that, that we needed. So I think he was a good pickup.

This is the third AWPer in the team since fifflaren was replaced, you had maikelele and allu before. Can you compare them with draken, not on a player level basis but by their style of AWPing? Who do you see being more aggressive, more passive, some people were talking about draken maybe being a more passive-style AWPer?  How do you see him?

From what I've seen with draken so far he's been very aggressive, I think allu was very passive, maikel was kind of aggressive as well, he was in the middle, could play both passive and aggressive. And draken so far has been very aggressive, going for picks both as CT and T, trying to get picks. draken is by far the most aggressive AWPer I've played with.

Moving on to the games, you started with G2 on Inferno. It seemed that you were very off on the T side especially, they were shutting you down with the double AWP. It looked like you lacked cohesion and utility usage, how did you see the game developing and what went wrong?

The game against G2 was a big mess honestly.

We were not used to how they played because we have never played against a double AWP on the new Inferno before. In one of the first rounds we got picked off, two entries super fast, and we were in a 3v5. Then we were saying "try not to get picked" and that made everyone play super passive instead. We didn't really do our standard, take the map control that was needed and I think that really hurt us in the end. We were just sitting and waiting for them to do mistakes and they were just holding sites, so we had to come to them and they shut us down.

That was just a really bad game, we talked a lot about that game, how we could've done it differently, we watched the demo, analyzed our own play… It was a good experience at least for us on Inferno, we know what do do the next time we play. But they owned us, we had nothing to do against them as T.

Moving on, you played against MVP. In the beginning it seemed like a tight match but you closed it out pretty comfortably in the end, looking at the score. How did you feel about that match, against the Asian team?

In the beginning, we tried to do set strats as T but they shut us down on B long, they just used tonnes of nades and we just died. We had a timeout after a few rounds and said "Just do standard, we can out-aim these guys, just do comfortable plays". That was what we said and then we won 5-6 rounds in the row and won the T side at least, 8-7. CT we didn't do anything special, we didn't know how they played, we had no info, just did our play and shut them down. That was a pretty easy win, but it was a good timeout, the timeout won us the game.

Now you played against Virtus.pro, you had a good start with the two first rounds and then you lost against Glocks practically, you personally pushed the doors then, and later you lost the 1v4 against neo as well. What went wrong in those rounds and how did you manage to get such a good half considering them?

The round where they had two P250s and three Glocks I kinda lost the round for us, I pushed squeaky and didn't check the left corner, it was kinda stupid. We had the mentality going into the game that we should just run them over, push their confidence down because we know they had a very tough game yesterday. So if we start really tough on them they would probably break down and we would probably win the game super easy, that was the kind of mentality we had when I tried to go for that push—but it was super stupid and I will probably never do that again.

The 1v4 against neo, I think everything happened so fast so it was more chaos in TeamSpeak, we weren't quiet and didn't just say: "you smoke, you defuse"… It went too fast and we weren't able to just kill him.

Were you surprised that after those rounds you were able to get such a good CT side? Usually VP would punish such mistakes?

Yeah, Virtus.pro is probably one of the better teams on Nuke, I would say that we are probably the best team on Nuke, we haven't had a chance to play it, a lot of teams remove it against us and I think more teams will remove it against us in the future as well. But VP is one team that isn't afraid to play Nuke, we have some new stuff no one has seen before so I guess they got a bit surprised by how we played. I think our CT side has improved a lot with draken, so right now we are one of the best team, if not the best team on Nuke.

THREAT came in as the in-game leader, then stopped doing that because of the rule change. What is his role now, is he on the micro stuff, like certain flashes, smokes, positions, or maybe on the macro scale, the maps, vetos and thing like that?

He is doing both tactics, he is helping xizt call, helping him with how to do the game plan, when to do rounds for example. For vetos, he watches demos of specific teams and talks to us about it. We feel super prepared, he does a great job preparing us for the game. He's a coach, doing strats, watching demos, helping with tactics, doing tactical timeouts when he sees something. Because it's the same as Major rules here, he is good at taking timeouts and telling us do this and this and that.

Professeur writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter.