Wasp is the coach of NBA, formerly Vipers, a team with a combination of veterans like Creators and Poison and promising new blood like Spiker and Reverse. I got to talk with Wasp about the recent roster changes, the SCS run and the struggles surrounding it, IGLing, and more.
So here I am with Wasp, the coach of now NBA formerly Vipers. Which this is take two of the interviews due to various troubles. So now we’re here Wasp. Thanks for coming on. How are you doing today?
Thanks for having me. I’m doing good. It was a long day. But I’m glad to be home. It’s Friday. I get to sit down.
Today it’s Friday in California. We’ll start with the new roster because you know, that was announced last night. NBA, it’s Poison, Spiker, Creators, Max1ly, and Reverse. Reverse and Spiker are the two new pickups. Just give me some thoughts on this process. Because post SCS this was looking like a very different roster than what it is now.
I’ll say first off, I think the roster we have now can be and probably will be our most successful roster ever. We bring in these two new guys, Spiker has been crazy forever, but he’s just pretty freshly turned 18. He was on iF for like a week, and then just went back to AA, now he’s with us. And then Reverse obviously, it’s his first time in T2, he’s 18 not too long ago if I’m not mistaken, but also he showed up really prominently in the scene. He had that Nuers run where it was like, everybody discovers who he is then shoots the top in the span of a couple months. And so it’s been really exciting to watching these players. You want me to go into the the whole two players leaving/drops now?
If you like, we can talk about now or later.
Okay. That’s probably the first question that most people have so I guess I can answer that. We had Twiizt and Nyx leave our team. Twiizt decided that he wanted a new environment, it wasn’t anything bad. It was just, sometimes things get stale after a while and you want to try something new. He decided to go and explore some options which we were totally cool with. And Nyx, great player, got nothing against him, just felt that it wasn’t the right fit for exactly what we needed and we also wanted a fresh start. So we let him go. All on good terms, we’re all still cool. Nothing bad, no team beef or anything like that.
So we decided we’re gonna look around and some players. We had, I want to say, eight. We tried out eight players and obviously settled on our two. Since we had Twiizt leave we were looking for a secondary breach or a flex. The way we run our team is basically two entries, two flex, and one hard support. And then those two flexes can switch to entries or hard supports, whatever it may be.
So we were looking for someone who was really flexible, and also was able to give the calling abilities of Nyx when needed, and then did the role of Twiizt. And then we were also looking for somebody really strong on firepower. Max has always been our first entry. But our second entry has changed a few times. Initially it was Twiizt and he went to hard breach. We put Tim on it. Or Creators, I’ll refer to him as Tim. Tim is Creators for anyone who doesn’t know Tempo Tim. So it was Tim on the second entry. And then we switched it up when we had Drixs, and then we dropped Drixs and then it was back to Tim.
This time we really wanted Tim to be on a flex and we really wanted to lock in another entry. So we were looking at predominantly entry players. It’s not my right, nor should I or anyone mention who we tried out. Just out of respect for everybody. But I will say we tried out eight players and I will say that it was actually a really tough decision. Every one of the players played very well. Pretty much every one of our scrims we were like, oh this is gonna get harder and harder. Because it was like man, this person played great and this person played great and almost everybody, an exclusion of just a few people, almost everybody had to get two or three different scrims to figure it out. So our selection process was definitely not quick, like we’ve made the mistake of in the past.
That’s good to hear that there’s so many good choices because that’s not always the case. Sometimes you can be without any talent, any real, real good pickup. So, you know, having a glut of talent is way better than the alternative. Tell me a little bit more about picking up Spiker. Because he was one of the main IGLs for Arial Arise Academy and now he is coming into Vipers, which already has Poison as an IGL, and then last time you mentioned that Creators has a lot of say in the team as well. Is there a worry that there’s going to be too many cooks in the kitchen with Spiker joining in?
Definitely not. I can kind of go over the way we run our team. And it changes here and there just depending on how it goes. So we mainly picked up Spiker -when I mentioned that we want to be able to call stuff, it’s more that we have a primary IGL but if someone sees an opportunity, they have the ability to come up with something and create an opening, create that IGL opportunity. They don’t have to say, “Hey Poison, here’s this thing that we want to do” and then Poison creates opportunity. They can say, “Alright, this is what we’re doing.” So creating people in every single one of those roles is really important to us.
Sticking with having Tim on the flex, he’s able to handle the entries when needed and then Reverse and Max are obviously two very smart players. So that helps, that they know what they’re doing too. And then Spiker can call stuff if he needed, he’s really vocal. He’s similar in ways to Twiizt with his really aggressive play style on his role, which is not super common to see, usually your hard support’s not very aggressive. But when you have a really aggressive hard support that wins his gun fights, it’s really nice. So we added Spiker for the fact that he had the ability to call stuff, also his gunskill was really good, and he was aggressive.
In his tryouts, he ran like three or four with us, I said every time that he, just every single round he did something that really impressed me. Whether it was like, one time I can mention is, someone threw a grenade, I don’t remember what map it was, but someone threw a grenade at a ceiling so it would hit the floor. We were on Attack. And then it hit the ceiling and he knew that someone was boxed in this room, and he [Spiker] was outside of that room. The grenade hit behind this guy and he knew that off that grenade blowing up, that guy was going to turn around to see where the grenade was. So as soon as that dude turned around, he ran in and killed him. And he thought of that in like half a second. Stuff like that is really impressive and takes control of the round and everything like that. So he’s been great. And then obviously, Reverse, if people have been watching them.
SCS, he went nuclear.
He is still in the same reign of terror. And he will be for a long time. He’s a very, very, very talented player. We were kind of joking about it, it was like him and Max on the same team. I think it was Reedsink. I think they made the tweet about it. It was like: if I saw this roster like two years ago. I was like yeah, it would have been kind of wild.
I do have a question about roles though because obviously, as far as basic overall structure goes, two entries, two flex, one hard breach. You mentioned it there that Spiker’s on hard breach, which I know is a departure for him. Has there been any trouble bedding him into that new role because on Arial Arise Academy that was Neo filling that position, but now Spiker is there. Are there any any worries about that?
He’s actually not our primary hard breach. That’s still Poison.
Oh, okay.
He’s our, I guess you could say secondary support but he’s really also like one of those secondary flex players. So you have like two different types of flex players. You have the flex player which is like Tim that’s your Sledge, your Buck that type of flex. And Tim is also -that dude can play literally any role. We had one scrim against somebody and he dropped 30 kills in two maps. No. almost four- he dropped 18 and then the next one he dropped 21. So he almost had 40 kills on hard support. Literally running Thermite. And then obviously everybody’s seen him on entry and then everybody’s seen him on flex so that you can play like literally any position.
Then Spiker comes in and he can play this, because you usually run two hard breachers, he can play the Hibana or he can switch off to Twitch or he can play a Zo. He’s that more hard support type flex but he also has the ability to play the other things if needed. So he’s really proficient at everything he does. Like I said, that aggressive playstyle really allows him to take opportunities and he does it well.
I know we’re gonna rehash some stuff that we’ve already talked about last time but since that one’s not coming out I figured we’re gonna have to cover it again. So Poison as an IGL, what does he do and what makes him so strong in the role? Because he is kind of viewed as you know, MrB’s out and about to go into SI quals and then right behind him is Mr. P, Mr. Poison.
He’s really good at what he does. Like I said, we’ve kind of got on him about his aim, it has not been like the greatest recently. Lost a lot of gunfights and stuff. He’s improved that pretty rapidly. So I think the next time that the world stage sees Poison it’s going to be a very different Poison than you guy’s saw. He’s still not Shaiiko, but he’s improved a lot. So it’s a really good thing to see, top fragging some maps type thing. So he’s improved a lot in that category, which makes him even more scary, but he’s also just a very, very smart and fast thinking player.
There’s not a lot of times where he’s like, “Hold on, I gotta think of something.” It’s, he’s given an opportunity and within seconds he can create something. And he can create something out of nothing too. I’ve seen him pull together 2v5s. Not like I just go in and shoot the dude, he actually structures it out. So he’s a really smart player, and he thinks really fast. Thinking really fast and thinking really smart allows the rest of your team to create opportunities or think of other things. And he’s always down to like, if someone’s like, “Wait, I think this might work too,” he’s like, “Alright, we’re gonna go off what he said, here’s the new plan,” and then does that entirely and it works a lot of the time. So he’s a very, very smart player.
Let’s talk about your SCS run real briefly. I know at this point, it’s over a month past, but there hasn’t been a lot of competition recently. So we gotta go a little bit back. Not the run you guys wanted and obviously, very different look. No Reverse, no Spiker. But how do you think it went? And you know the whole Drixs/Nyx saga, what led to that?
Filthy had to leave because of work reasons. We were going to trial some people in his spot because we wanted more fragging power and like I said, this has been a while and a lot of stuff has happened since then, so I may get some key components wrong. Filthy had left for work originally but before that we wanted to trial people in his position to give more fragging power. And then we started scrimming with him again, and we realized what he brought. He still had really good fragging power but what he brought to the calls, he was basically a second IGL. And we were really, really good with him. So we actually stopped our trialing and we continued with Filthy. I don’t even think we made the announcement about that. But we’re just going to continue with Filthy and we stopped our tryouts. And then like a week later, he learned that his school schedule had changed so he couldn’t play. So then we were back on the hunt.
That’s when we picked up Drixs. Nothing against him, he’s a very talented player. I think he just got, I would say a little unlucky. He got the first game jitters. It was in our SI quals, I think he went like 1 and 12 or something like that. It was actually against S2, who’s Reverse. But I mean, he’s a really talented player, everybody knows that. It’s just sometimes like Forrest Gump said: shit happens. It is what it is. And you just got to move on sometimes. So we decided we’re gonna keep looking for some other players.
We tried some other people, landed on Nyx. Like I said, it worked for a bit, it just ended up not being the right combo for us. Like I said, I got nothing against him. His mental has improved tenfold. We had zero mental issues with him. He’s a very talented player. Sometimes some of the most talented players in the world get dropped from their team and it has nothing to do with them. It’s just sometimes things don’t click right. And so that was all that.
SCS was not what we wanted it to be. But we also weren’t too heartbroken about it purely because it was kind of a trial thing for us. We were like, okay, we’re trying these new players. It’s unfortunate we have to do it in this manner. But let’s instead of pouting about it, like I’ve preached this to my team a lot more recently and something my brother taught me is that bullets downrange, stay downrange. Think about shooting at a target, once you’ve shot your bullet, okay, well, if you miss the target or hit four feet left, it doesn’t matter. You worrying about it or you overthinking it or are you thinking about it at all, it’s not going to change if that hole hit the target. They’re shot, they stay down range, forget about it, focus on your next shot.
So us sitting here and being like “Man, this kind of sucks” accomplishes literally nothing. We just take it as a learning experience. You win some, you learn some. And we took everything that we could from it, use it kind of as our trialing periods, and learned a lot about ourselves and our roles and everything like that. And we’ve gotten a lot better since then from it. So it was an unfortunate period that had to be right there. But I don’t think I would trade it for anything. Given that we’ve come out a better team from it.
Talking about coming out of SCS as a better team. I know whatever Ubisoft has planned for T2 in the future, post-SI is not public, probably not a lot of information about that. But what, at least right now, what is NBA aiming towards in the future? Because I know it can be hard to stay focused and keep that grind going when you don’t have a clear goal. So what is NBA’s goal right now?
We’re kind of just hoping for the best. I mean, I can tell you on record right now I, as well as everyone on my team, have heard literally nothing. Well, we’ve heard everything we’ve heard nothing. I’ve heard. T2 wasn’t happening. I’ve heard we’re getting like these Minors and it’s going to be even more advanced and it’s going to have even a bigger prize pool. Which, the game is dying so I don’t see any way that that’s true. I’ve heard that we’re getting franchised again. I mean, I’ve heard literally everything. My bet, if I had to place money on it, and this is literally off nothing but my own speculation and my own guessing, is that we will have a CL as normal. But once again, it could be really wrong. Look at how many teams, I don’t even know, so many teams disbanded. I think there’s only like six designated CL teams when there should be 10. So I have no idea how that’s gonna look.
And I was very, very against taking out relegations. I think it’s one of the one of the worst decisions Ubisoft has ever made. Completely disincentivizes people who are in harder positions. I mean, I can count on one hand, probably less than one hand, the amount of support staff that have gone to Pro League from just getting picked up and not going through the relegation route. That kind of makes it harder for people like in my position, which I’m not even old enough to go to Pro League so it doesn’t matter for me. But for other people, I feel bad. And people in the support player position, like the position Poison’s in, I think Mr. B’s been the first one in a long time that’s gotten that T2 look and been like, Okay, we need this guy for Pro League. It’s usually fraggers.
And even then, he’s struggling. He’s still in RTV. Packer got picked up, but he’s not even playing the same role he was doing on RTV, and that was like the RTV support player.
Well, we’ll see how that goes. I mean, I don’t know. Yes, he’ll play SI quals. -I don’t know anything. I’m telling you now, I don’t know anything- I would think it’s crazy knowing the amount of teams that you know are trailing players. The most I will say about what I know is what R6Leaks on Twitter posts, because everybody can see that. And if I’m just relaying what I see on that, then that’s whatever, right? But as far as teams, Beastcoast is basically nuking their whole roster, Parabellum basically nuking their whole roster. You see literally everybody on Parabellum is getting trialed in place for so and then some people are getting dropped. I think they only have like officially 3/5s of the roster, according to Parabellum.
There might be like one or two other teams that are trialing players. So you look at that, and you’re like, it would actually be insane for MrB to not get picked up. I think, at least what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen is that MrB struggles in an environment where he’s being forced to play a certain way and he has to shape around a team instead of shaping a team around him. I think when you just have a really good IGL that’s kind of just what happens. You form a team around you. Look at these players that he’s picked up that haven’t been like the most known best players in the world. He’s won CL and won everything. So I think he absolutely deserves his reign in Pro League and he’ll get it eventually. If it’s not this time, it’ll be next. And if not, then then after, it’ll happen.
I’m a firm believer that relegations are a good thing because it allows these teams that come up together to stay together when they get up there. And sometimes certain players need those environments. Like Gity, on record Fett and others have said he’s the backbone of the team, but you don’t hear anyone like trying out Gity. At least not nearly as publicly as some of these other posts get about like, “Oh, MrB is trying out for this NAL team and this NAL team.” You hear nothing about that for Gity but on record he’s one of the most important pieces of the team! That’s got to be worth something. But that’s a different discussion. Where I want to take this now is what you look for in an IGL and what you think the role of a coach should be and then we’ll start closing out off those.
So the role of an IGL. There’s kind of two ways that teams run nowadays. You have the very strict IGLing, which is the biggest example I can give as MrB. Very strict. Tells everybody exactly what to do, how to play. And when you have really talented players who don’t have a lot of experience that works really well, because they’re focused on nothing but doing exactly what they’re told and aiming. Doesn’t mean they’re not smart players, just means they don’t have as much experience to think entirely on their own and for all the other teammates. And that can be a blessing and a curse sometimes. If you have good players that go well with that system, it works really well. So we’ve seen that implemented by him time and time again.
Look at a team like ours, we have more experience. Max has been playing forever, Tim was obviously in Pro League for a couple of years, Poison has been around forever. We have more of that experience so that super strict IGLing is not needed. That doesn’t mean we don’t have an IGL, we do it’s Poison. It’s just a lot less strict. It’s a lot of people throwing in each of their ideas.
The way I think about it is, it’s kind of hard to explain, but in the SEAL teams, they have their team leader, right? Who’s their IGL, basically. And they’re given a package, which is essentially, this is this person that you’re gonna go kill or go capture, whatever. And then they all as a team, figure out how they’re gonna go do it. And they all throw in these ideas and then the team leader basically makes the final plan with what everybody does. So he makes the construction off of everybody’s advice and that’s basically what Poison does. It’s not like, okay, it’s my way or the highway, like some others.
And then you also have the teams that are like Xset, who don’t have an IGL, and it’s just everybody throws everything together. Once again, got to have a lot of experience with that. Gotta have a system that works for that. A lot more rare. Works well sometimes, and it’s a lot more aggressive play style, sometimes it doesn’t.
Do you think that’s a sustainable style? The Xset style of five man calling, because I know, some people think it’s like the future, but others think this is a temporary fad.
No. Not sustainable, not at all. The reason being is because nothing stays the same forever. Now, whether that’s a player’s talent, players getting burned out, or players changing roles, inevitably one of those things is going to happen. And if you have a system like that, all five things have to be working together. Once you have changes, like role changes, or roster changes, or players quitting or getting fired, whatever it may be. When one thing changes, everything changes.
Look at the team like Xset, if Spiritz who I believe is like, the IGL. It’s a five man IGL but he’s the main shot caller. Let’s say he quits. That team is now in shambles because they gotta regroup and they gotta get this whole idea of how to do this with another player who plays entirely different.
So it’s really bad for collateral damage. When it works, it works. But for one team to do it continuously for a while, it doesn’t. Look at a team like us, for whatever reason say Max quits, we get another talented fragger, nothing’s gonna change. I mean, it will but it won’t. Because what the person in Max’s place is doing is staying the same the whole time. It’s not changing because Poison is calling. So it’s, it’s not sustainable at all. And I’ve had a lot of conversations, people who think it is, it’s just not.
What do you think about the role of coaching? Some people say the role of coach is addressing whatever the team needs, other people think that means like, only tactics, only motivation, only working on mental, only being a leader of men. What do you think a coach should be? Do they need to fill whatever gap or is it just whatever they end up being really good at?
Filling a gap is somewhat right. I can say what a coach should do, and I can say what I do. So a coach generally should be able to identify problems and then fix them. Some people think a coach is just someone who comes in and creates strats. I’ll tell you, I’ve been on this team for like, I don’t know, four or five months literally have not made a single strat. Because it’s not my role. That’s not what I was hired to do. That’s also not what they want me to do. Poison and Tim have much, much more experience than me. So they work together and they create the strats because they know that fits around them and all it is, right?
Now there’s times I come in with like, I was on a team, Phaze Flamingos, where our whole idea was to make the opponent so confused that by the time they figure out what to do, they don’t have enough time to do it. So I have some really weird ones. And sometimes I’ll throw those in like “you guys want to try this?” because it’s just fun. And it picks up team morale sometimes. It’ll be like some hole where you’re looking through like three floors to a hatch with a 2x scope on Rook. It’s just weird. Sometimes I’ll throw those but generally I’m not making strats.
My main role is an analyst. I spent a while building an analytical engine. What I’m very, very good at has been being able to look at a stats sheet and then be able to identify exactly what we’re doing wrong just from a statistic. So those are the things where if we are failing round and round over, I can tell them. I’ll be okay, this is our problem.
A lot of times, what I try to do is I try to get the guys to think for themselves. So instead of being like, let’s say our problem is we are dying on entry too fast, which 99% of the time means that we are moving too fast. If we’re dying on entry first every round it means we’re moving too fast. Or our trade statistics low, and we’re opening, that means we’re just not close together. So I’ll be like, “Hey, guys, instead of a 1-1-3 split, let’s do a 2-3 split or a five man push. And let’s slow down. Take the first 30 seconds of the game to do this thing and then do this thing.” I sometimes do that but a lot of times I’m like, “Okay, guys, we’re dying first and we’re really split apart. What can we do?” and they’ll be like “Okay, so we need to slow down and we need to stick together.” It builds that repetition of them being able to think for themselves. So the next time they encounter a situation where, damn, we’re dying first every time, we got two minutes left in the round, and we all die. And they’re like, “Oh, wait, I know what I can do.” Because they have the repetition to think about that stuff over.
And that helps preserve timeouts on Game Day.
Yeah. I almost never take time outs. I almost never take them. I mean, if I see something really major, if I see something majorly wrong with how we work -not a fluke. Not someone missed a reinforcement on the wall so we lost a round. But our team not working together, I will call a timeout after round one. I’ll do it. But there was other times where we go to max OT and I don’t call one the entire game because sometimes its just a fluke.
A lot of times, I would say probably 60% of the time I’ve ever called the timeout, I’ve literally just not talked, it’s just a minute for them to breathe. Just a minute for them to breathe and to be like “Okay, guys, just we’re good. We’re just getting so stressed thinking about this stuff.” Or I’ll be like guys just take a deep breath, get a drink of water if you have one. Stop thinking about last round, right? Bullets downrange stay downrange. Just keep chugging along, you’re fine. Just focus on what’s next. Make sure every part of you is getting every part of you. Don’t focus on what your teammates got your teammates got it. Your teammate has it covered. Don’t worry about Don’t worry, don’t worry on you, because you worry about them. You’re gonna forget what you need to do.
Last question to close out. I think I asked it to you last time, I don’t quite remember. But anything underrated in the meta that you think should be in the meta? My go to Echo shotty.
I think it’s what I said last time, and I still think it applies now is Monty. I think Monty is still the most overpowered operator in the game and people don’t really realize it. He can practically not be knifed if you’re good with him. You can’t stop plants if you don’t have a nitro, if you’re good with him. You can take space if you’re good with him, like without dying, pretty easily. And then also it’s like really hard to kill them if he drops his shield right in front of you and knifes you. He’s basically just a live camera that can scare the shit out of people. If people played him right and people got over this whole thing of like, “I don’t have a gun” I actually think he would be so overpowered that Ubi would have to nerf him in some way because he’s that good.
If you go in look at the percentage of rounds, at least us, at least for Vipers in Stage 3. Look at the percentage of time we played Monty and the time we won it. It’s probably over 90%. Because I mean, Poison’s just really good at it. And it takes so much space. But also, you just hardly ever run it because it’s really situational. We don’t really, we don’t run it almost ever. But it’s one of those things like, if people instead of making it situational and just ran it like he was a normal op, then I actually think it would be really overpowered but I don’t know. I’m wrong sometimes. So maybe I’m wrong here.
I’m here for it, man. The Monty can battle the Echo shotty.
I don’t want a Monty meta though. I really don’t. I hate playing Monty players.
Anything you want to close with?
Everyone should keep their heads up. Life gets hard. No easy day. Front towards enemy.