The hyper-aggressive Swedish AWPer draken has recently been put onto the Ninjas in Pyjamas bench, awaiting a new organization to come and save him from contract hell.









Recent drama between whether or not the Ninjas will hold onto draken to analyze their roster further has stirred the twitter scene. With the current roles of the team being askew, we can only assume that he’ll make his return, and if not him, another AWP player. The question that has to be asked still remains, where does he go if the team chooses to let him go?

A point that some people like to bring up in conversations about draken is his supposed 30 degree window, basically referencing his inability to hit the shots that are directly in front of him while being able to crush players outside the normal range of flicks. While this may be true in some cases, his ability to get the kills that matter is unrivaled in the Swedish scene at his level. His consistency with the team shows that over the course of 14 LAN events he has managed to go below a 1.00 rating just once at DreamHack Marseille in April of this year.

With quite a few teams around the scene in need of a strong AWP player, it is my job to take a look at some of the options that draken may have available to him and evaluate them.





Migrate to North America

Cloud9 is one team in specific that has been having troubles with the big green gun for quite a while now, having Skadoodle as one of their most on and off players in the roster for years now. With the opportunity available, I would expect Cloud9 to pounce on the chance to acquire draken after the money they received for selling Jacky “Stewie2K” Yip earlier this year. It would certainly bring them some more consistency with time, and it would only require draken to speak in English as opposed to Swedish as he does now, which shouldn’t be a difficult feat. The team would certainly break beyond the limits it has now and regain its spot as one of the most map dominant teams in the game.





Join Another Swedish Lineup

With GODSENT on the rise recently and Fnatic in roster chaos, it would not be the worst idea for him to want to join one of those teams to grant them some more stability. Considering Simon “twist” Eliasson of GODSENT is a hybrid AWP player, I am certain he would not mind giving the AWP role to draken in favor of a permanent rifle / secondary AWP role instead. Fnatic having been in doubts of Jesper “JW” Wecksell’s abilities to AWP before could also mean there is a chance that draken could weasel his way into the lineup considering all the hectic roster moves the team’s already been making. With Maikil “Golden” Selim taking the reins on entry-fragging since the removal of Lekr0, you could also make the case that draken could replace him and assume the primary AWP role over JW who would be more usually rifling and secondary AWPing. If he does not choose to follow any of these paths, he could always remain on the NiP bench and wait to see where the wind takes him.