NiP put nawwk on medical leave

The organization's performance team has decided to give the AWPer time off after he had been showing signs of exhaustion as of late.

Tim "⁠nawwk⁠" Jonasson is expected to be out of action until the beginning of the next Regional Major Ranking event in Europe, DreamHack Open Fall, which is slated to kick off on October 15, with Swedes being among the teams directly invited to the main part of the tournament.

Coach Björn "⁠THREAT⁠" Pers will step into the lineup during Ninjas in Pyjamas's remaining matches in the ongoing ESL Pro League Season 12's group stage, against FaZe and fnatic on Friday and Saturday, respectively.

"With Tim we’ve decided to pull the trigger early on, channeling all our efforts into de-escalating the situation, before it turns into a much larger problem that could put him on the sidelines even longer," Ninjas in Pyjamas's COO, Jonas Gundersen, explained. "With this course of action, we hope to have him back on the server sooner rather than later."

The decision comes at a time when Ninjas in Pyjamas are already highly unlikely to make it through to the playoffs of ESL Pro League Season, in which the Swedish side is currently sitting on a 1-4 record with just the aforementioned two matches left to play in Group B. If Ninjas in Pyjamas don't manage to advance to the playoffs of the event, with nothing else on the calendar until mid-October they will have nearly a month to recuperate ahead of the start of DreamHack Open Fall.

nawwk's situation adds fuel to the conversation regarding burnout issues and oversaturation of tournaments at the highest level. Those topics have resurfaced in the last few months after Olof "⁠olofmeister⁠" Kajbjer, Lukas "⁠gla1ve⁠" Rossander, and Andreas "⁠Xyp9x⁠" Højsleth took extended leave in May for similar reasons while the top-tier event calendar became even busier than usual amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"The competition around the tier 1 scene is reaching new peaks and the requirements on players staying ready at all times keeps growing," Gundersen stated. "It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the cushion we work with when a team is only consisting of five players is simply not enough. It allows very little room for error and puts an immense amount of pressure on the players. We’re paying the price for it in the short term with having THREAT to fill in and it's definitely something that we will look at how to mitigate in the future.”