FaZe have become victorious at ESL One New York, continuing their dominant run in the grand final, where they defeated Liquid 3-0, with two of the maps ending up in landslides.

FaZe have used all the time they could to practice in between events

After the grand final, we got a hold of the MVP, Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač, to quiz him about FaZe's first title with their new lineup:

Such a dominant run throughout the tournament, even in the final, just one of the maps was close. Did you expect to come into this so strong?

Yeah, we expected to come here strong, but we didn't expect that we're going to have results like this. We worked a lot since Malmö, we used almost every possible day to practice, which we had, and we improved our game by far. So I'm really happy that we managed to improve our game in such a short time, we were going from event to event for three weeks in a row, so I'm really happy that managed to find our game.

In ELEAGUE, we talked a lot, also in Malmö, right after we lost, we went to practice and... the loss against Gambit, it was not supposed to be a loss, because we lost four anti-ecos in the last map, so it's kind of hard to say that we deserved to lose in the group stage. In ELEAGUE, we used like four days or five to practice, even when we had matches, officials, we practiced before and after. And that helped us a lot, we just talked, worked basically on our communication and our teamplay.

Now that you've played those couple of tournaments, do you feel like you've figured out the roles, considering the changes brought you such a stacked, playmaking team?

Yeah, I think that everyone has their role in the team now. It's not set roles, but everyone knows which role he should take in a certain round. We have five all-round players who can do everything, so that helps us a lot in terms of roles, so it doesn't really matter if we didn't set the roles, we're just versatile players, so it's pretty easy to do the things to win the map.

Would you compare yourselves to the old fnatic in that sense?

Yeah, exactly, I think it's pretty much the same, you have every player who can do anything in the team to win the round. They know what should be done to win the round, so I think we are similar to fnatic at the moment, I hope (laughs).

With the previous lineup, just after you joined, you had a good period but only won one of the tournaments, what will be different this time? Now you've won a tournament as well, how do you keep it up?

We're going to try to win every event possible, I think now we have everything that is needed to do that, so it's just up to us to put the time and to work as a team, I think.