cadiaN: "I had three offers from teams that I could win with"

The Danish AWPer prepares for his final hurrah with HEROIC before leaving for his new home.

HEROIC come into the BLAST Premier Fall Final in a state of turmoil. The Danish organization has recently benched Martin "⁠stavn⁠" Lund and Jakob "⁠jabbi⁠" Nygaard, who are linked with moves to Astralis, while Casper "⁠cadiaN⁠" Møller is set to play his final tournament with the team before he departs for pastures new.

This means that HEROIC's makeshift roster, consisting of recent additions Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen and Rasmus "⁠Zyphon⁠" Nordfoss, comes into the event in Copenhagen with uncertain expectations. cadiaN has admitted he wants to put more pressure on his team, however, as he aims for a successful HEROIC swansong.

Ahead of their opener against Vitality, cadiaN sat down with HLTV to discuss his future, HEROIC's expectations for the tournament, and playing with dupreeh.

Editor's note: Moments after sitting down for the interview HEROIC informed HLTV cadiaN would not answer any questions about the dramatic events surrounding stavn and jabbi.

If the embed above doesn't show up, you can listen to the audio version here.

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Without going into too much detail, it's been an eventful month for you. How are you doing?

I'm doing pretty good. I think that it's definitely been hectic, and I've been caught by people who were asking me 'How are you doing?' Because my usual response is just 'Everything is nice and quiet', which you say in Denmark. And they're like, 'Well, it's not nice and quiet, it's a bit turbulent.'

It's been a different month compared to many others. As a player, you always question how many people are interested in signing you, but that was quickly confirmed. There was a lot of interest around my name, and that gave me a lot of confidence that I would arrive at a home that I feel comfortable in afterward. But it's been an emotional ride.

Was there never a chance that you would stay?

There were talks as well, but with how things played out, for me it also made more sense for my current ambitions to move to a different project.

There are reports about you tying the knot with Liquid. Can you confirm or deny or say anything regarding your future, even in vague terms?

I can say that I've been in talks with multiple organizations. I've received some good offers, and I am very confident in the next home that I'm headed to. I believe that they have the players and the staff around the team to win from more or less day one, but also that it will be a big task to make that happen. Potential is a thing that you can talk about forever, but fulfilling the potential is a completely different thing. So it's going to be a big task, but it's also going to be a fun one.

You said that you had a lot of offers, and I remember your Dexerto interview, where you said that you would only consider offers from teams that you could win with. Were there more offers like that for you to consider? Was there a real decision to be made?

In my opinion, I had three offers from teams that I could win with, and some of the offers were more unexpected than others. I think the obvious links to teams such as Liquid and NIP make sense from the situation they've been in, with their lack of leadership and so forth.

But there were one or two offers that I didn't see coming, and I'm not sure people are going to ever know because I don't do the agency part, and I also don't think it's my position to speak about those offers now. There was great interest in me, and I'm actually very surprised by the talks I had with multiple organizations about how far people have come in terms of scouting and what they're looking at. So I think that was a very healthy sign for the scene.

When do you expect people to know what's going on with you moving forward?

I'm expecting that before 2023 ends, my new team will be announced.

Talking about Fall Final, it's been dubbed as the last dance for you with Heroic, and you're playing with this temporary lineup as well. How are you approaching this tournament with all of that in mind?

It's a good question. One thing I was bringing up in the team meeting today was that we tried to play the Blast World Finals with a stand-in twice, one time with b0RUP, and one time with k0nfig. I would like to put just a tiny bit more pressure on ourselves to achieve a result because the kind of loser mindset we've maybe had for those two times has not worked out that well.

Obviously, we are not expecting to win everything. We had one day of practice on each map, so that is not a lot. But practice has been going pretty well, and I think I'm one of the captains out there who is better at handling things being a little bit messy and crazy. Because of our style with the mid-round calling, it doesn't need to be perfect, and you don't need to have five set executions on every map. I'll figure something out, and I'm very confident about that.

However, me being the only player at the event who has never played an official in CS2 is obviously also a big pressure point for sure. In terms of total playtime and team practice, I'm far behind everyone else playing here. But I've been enjoying the CS2 ride so far, and I'm excited to see how the games will go.

You're in a group with Astralis. There's a lot of history there, and a lot of ongoing reports as well between the two organizations. What do you think about a potential clash against them? If you meet them in front of the fans further in the tournament, how do you think that would go?

I don't think there's a big chance that we're going to play them in the arena. There's a decent chance we meet them in the group stage. I think that there are probably tougher conditions to perform in their camp right now than in ours because I can imagine there's a lot of uncertainty around the rumors, who's being replaced, who's not being replaced, and what's being communicated. We know what the situation is like, maybe it's not great, but we know what we're dealing with.

A guy like dupreeh is a perfect fit for these kinds of situations because he has such a great mood, a lot of experience, and he also knows how to win when things are not completely perfect. And I think everyone here in Heroic also is eager to prove things. What Zyphon wants to prove is different from what Sjuush wants to prove, but everyone is coming in with a lot of energy to do well, and I think that energy is something we're trying to channel to victories.

How has it been to play alongside dupreeh? You played with him at a TWC, right? You have a little bit of history there, but what has it been like?

I played some of the national games with him back then, not the LAN, but I played as a stand-in for device in 2014 or something, really far back. It's been really great, I didn't know exactly what to expect before starting to play with him, but he is like you see in the interviews and stuff. He is energized, happy, super talented at the game, and he also likes to take control of some situations, like calling what he wants.

Let's just say I'm not surprised that he's the guy with five Major championships after playing with him, he's definitely surprised me in a positive way. And if I had the feeling before playing with him, that maybe this guy is ending his career soon, that's not the feeling I had when playing with him.