apEX: "I'm not a guy that wants to change when we are winning"

Dan "⁠apEX⁠" Madesclaire admits he had his doubts about making changes in the off-season, whilst still acknowledging Shahar "⁠flameZ⁠" Shushan's talent.

Vitality made the somewhat shocking decision in the off-season to bench legendary Dane Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen, almost immediately after he had helped the team with their first-ever Major.

In dupreeh's stead came flameZ, a red-hot young talent who brings an injection of youthful exuberance and firepower into Vitality's ranks. The early signs have been positive as Vitality comfortably breezed through their opening BLAST Fall Groups games, albeit against heavily unfavored opposition.

With a strong start to life with flameZ secured, Vitality's IGL apEX sat down with HLTV to give his thoughts on their performances, the talent of flameZ, and to confess his doubts regarding changing a winning lineup.

Audio version: If you cannot see the Soundcloud embed below, head over here to listen to the interview.

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How do you feel about your first couple of performances with flameZ in the lineup?

Well I'm not going to lie, the worst one was a 16-6 for now, so I guess it's pretty convincing. I didn't expect us to play that good already, but I think the flow is going pretty well and flameZ is doing really well already. He's just feeling good in the team and he's such a nice guy. Obviously its only two games and we didn't play a top 10 team yet, we have to be honest, but it's still a really promising result for us. We will keep grinding until the most important tournaments for us.

How have the role fits been for flameZ, has he just swapped in one-for-one for dupreeh?

On most of them, yes. The big thing is we didn't want to change too much and give him too many responsibilities yet, I think that was my idea behind that, to not give him too much. When you are such a young player and you join a big team like this, I don't think it's that good to have too many responsibilities, so he has low responsibilities for now. With time he will get even more, but for now on some maps yes, it's one-for-one, on some others it's different.

Obviously you've changed a player. You were arguably the best team in the world at the end of last season, does changing a player lower your expectations a bit for this season? Or are you still looking to be one of the best teams, if not the best?

It doesn't lower our expectations for the whole season, just for the beginning. We know that we might have a drop down and that's normal, changing a player is a big thing and we didn't have much time to prepare for this event. We finished really late last year after Washington and we prefer having some rest, because we knew the second part of the season would be really tough most likely, two months that would be really tough until the end of our group in Pro League.

For us, it's just going to be about time. It's going to take a bit of time but we are working our ass off to come back to at least the level we were at, and hopefully a better level than before. I think that everyone is seeing the big talent that flameZ has and what he can bring to us, I see my team grinding and we are getting much better game on game, and I feel really good about that.

Last question and I will let you go: like you say flameZ is a huge talent, so picking him up was understandable, but was it difficult to let dupreeh go? Especially just after you had just won a Major?

For me, yeah, that was pretty tough. I'm not a guy that wants to change, most likely, when we are winning. Even though flameZ is a huge talent, for me it was pretty tough to change at that moment. I don't have any power in the team but they asked me, and I said that it was tough, even though flameZ has talent we were a winning team, and changing for a player that you can see from outside the server, you don't know what he will bring to the team. It's never easy.

For me leaving dupreeh is a really hard thing, I really enjoyed playing one-and-a-half years together. He brought a lot to the team, a good mood, a lot of experience, and stuff in really important games. Like at the Major, or I remember this game he popped off, one game where he was really crazy against Cloud9 in Rio. We were 10-0 down and he did some crazy individual things. It's never easy to replace such a player, that's why I think the drop down will come, but I also think it's a more natural role for flameZ to fit in, as the entry fragger. He likes it, he has big skill, he is young, he is crazy a bit in his head, it's just perfect in that sense. Obviously leaving dupreeh was tough when they made the decision, Vitality… I will say we. But it's already in the back of my mind, and I'm already focused on how can we lift trophies with Spinx.