NiKo: "It's great that we proved everyone we can still fight against top teams and lift trophies"

We caught up with the BLAST Pro Series Copenhagen 2019 MVP by HLTV x betway, Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač, and heard about his individual form and the importance of this win for FaZe.

FaZe showed dominance from the first match at BLAST, destroying favorites Astralis 16-2 on Inferno, and went on to drop only one map, an inconsequential one to Liquid, before lifting the trophy.

Following the grand final, we talked to NiKo and heard about turning around FaZe after the initial struggle, the comeback against Ninjas in Pyjamas on Nuke, and plans for the future.

How much does this victory mean after the struggles you had with FaZe?

It means everything, it is a huge, huge boost of confidence for everyone, teamwise, individually, it is just amazing that we have managed to win this event. Even if we wouldn't have won it, we would still be really proud of the run we had here, it is great that we proved everyone we can still fight against top teams and that we can still lift trophies. I'm super happy for the boys and I'm super proud of them.

How did you turn it around, from a few days ago losing online to Virtus.pro, and now beating Astralis and all of these teams to win the tournament?

I guess... I don't know how we lost to Virtus.pro to be honest, I guess it was an online game and we didn't really put too much focus on that game, we thought we would win it easily, which we didn't and that kind of messed us up. But our main focus was just BLAST and IEM Beijing, these two events are going to mean a lot to us for the rest of the year. We put all our focus we could into these two events and I'm happy that it is paying off.

Your individual form also showed here, you are the MVP of the tournament. Considering that a month ago you were saying that you don't understand why you were playing so badly, how did you turn it around?

I don't know, everything just clicked here. I didn't really care that I played badly before, I just came here as if it was any other event, as if I didn't play that badly before. I came here and I did what I had to do, and I'm happy that I finally started showing up. I think the most important thing for my individual performance was to bring in more structure to the team, which we have, and that allowed me to play better individually as well. That is one of the reasons I started stepping up again.

Let's touch on the final, obviously the Nuke comeback was pretty big, YNk touched on it before, saying that coming back into games is a focus for you guys. So how did you manage to come back and close out that map?

We never gave up, even though we were 15-8 down, we still had the same communication as at the beginning of the match, when we were leading 2-0. Nothing changed besides the score, our approach didn't change, the mentality that we have shown has been really good. Yeah, it was super-hard to comeback but we managed to do so just because we stayed calm and collected. I'm happy we managed to do it.

Dust2 nowadays, there seems to be a lot of focus on the B site from the Terrorist side, NiP was kind of abusing your B site and then when you switched to the Terrorist side, you were also hitting it a lot. Was there more to it, how did you see it going on in this game?

I didn't really pay attention to it that most of the teams are going B now, we just kind of stuck to our gameplan where we knew how they were holding B and we knew how much focus they were putting on fighting for Long. We didn't want to force the fights there so we sometimes faked it and we were going B because we knew that f0rest likes to play down Mid alone a lot and plopski likes to play around the B site alone. We tried to abuse that, pull some small fakes and tried to end up on B. I mean, I think we still had 3-4 rounds that we won on A that were pretty big, I don't really think the B site is really more favored now for the T side, it was just the game plan we had.

This year you won BLAST Pro Series Miami as well, but that turned out to be a one-off victory. Is this a start of something new?

Well, I hope so. I think we are on a really good path right now, the team's really clicking together and I think that we feel really confident right now and I think that is what we needed the most. FaZe, even before when we were playing badly, we would never lose to teams like Virtus.pro or some mid-tier teams, right? We would always get to quarter-finals, semi-finals, finals and that is the team we are going to be from now on, I would say. That is the main focus for us right now, to get there, stay consistently at the top and not lose to teams below, try to go to playoffs all the time. From there we just need more experience as a team, bring in more teamplay and I believe that at some point, we are going to be one of the best teams in the world.

You and coldzera playing together obviously didn't start that well, so a lot of haters, naysayers came up, a lot of comments about you as a team were written. Do you think that this proves them wrong now?

I don't want to say anything yet because it is just one event, time will show. I don't want to comment anything because every time I do it it turns out wrong (laughs). I'm just going to stay away from it, but yeah, we are going to prove them wrong, 100%.