Minnesota R\u00d8KKR coach explains how dropping MajorManiak was a \u201cbig hurt\u201d for the team Twitter: rokkrAt Major 4, Minnesota R\u00d8KKR placed top 12 after a Round 1 loss to OpTic Texas, ending their hopes of qualifying for CDL Champs. They played the event with a different roster to the one they started the season with and, one week later, they explained why losing Michael \u2018MajorManiak\u2019 Szymaniak was such a loss to the team. MajorManiak was one of the players that helped Minnesota pull off what has become colloquially known as the R\u00d8KKR Redemption, when they pulled off a best-of-9 reverse sweep against Toronto Ultra to win the Stage 5 Major in 2021. A respected shot-caller and sturdy assault rifle player, MajorManiak was a prominent part of R\u00d8KKR\u2019s success towards the tail end of the Cold War season, but with results lacking in Vanguard, they decided to make a switch. MajorManiak left the team after Major 2, eventually ending up on the Florida Mutineers, and was replaced by Colt \u2018Havok\u2019 McLendon, adding some more SMG firepower to the roster. While on paper the move seemed a good one, allowing Dillon \u2018Attach\u2019 Price and Preston \u2018Priestahh\u2019 Griener to take on the AR roles, it did not end up earning the team a playoff berth. In their post-season press conference, R\u00d8KKR coach Brian \u2018Saintt\u2019 Baroska spoke about MajorManiak, explaining how big of a loss he ended up being. \u201cMike was definitely a huge [benefit] to our team in terms of shot-calling in Search and Destroy,\u201d explained Saintt. \u201cI think he had such a big layer of consistency for us in that game mode, starting from the second half of Cold War when we kind of told him to take over that leadership role in that mode. \u201cBut when it comes to respawn we never really had a true leader on the team with any iterations of the roster, it was kind of always a team dynamic. But losing Mike was definitely a big hurt in S&D, in terms of default consistency \u2026 Mike did a really good job at reading the mid-rounds and having good defaults.\u201d Timestamp 17:02 It\u2019s impossible to tell whether losing MajorManiak\u2019s SnD prowess was what cost Minnesota a Champs spot, though winning just one of those Search & Destroy maps against OpTic Texas at Major 4 will have earned them an extra 10 CDL points, and could perhaps have helped them kick on further. Ultimately, it\u2019s unclear what the future of the Minnesota R\u00d8KKR looks like \u2014 they refused to comment on specifics when it came to the next iteration of the R\u00d8KKR squad \u2014 but they\u2019ll no doubt be hoping to find someone who can bring a similar level of expertise to the team to help them win championships again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Minnesota R\u00d8KKR coach explains how dropping MajorManiak was a \u201cbig hurt\u201d for the team Twitter: rokkrAt Major 4, Minnesota R\u00d8KKR placed top 12 after a Round 1 loss to OpTic Texas, ending their hopes of qualifying for CDL Champs. They played the event with a different roster to the one they started the season with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}