In Valorant, you can’t become a good team without a baseline of a skill; you can’t become a great team without strong comms, coordination, and playbooks; and you can’t become champions unless you add a heroic star performance as the cherry on top.
With Champions 2023 about to kick off, let’s look at each team’s strongest statistical performer from the year so far. I’ve selected one player per team, based on their numbers since the start of the 2023 VCT regular season. Teams are grouped by region and listed alphabetically by team name; the individual players are not ordered relative to one another.
Keep in mind that these will not necessarily be the most “important” player on each team, since even the best stats can’t capture non-gameplay factors like IGLing, leadership, prep, etc. And also bear in mind that if you disagree with which player has been highlighted for any of these teams, that’s what comments and/or social media is for! :D
(Unfortunately, I don’t have time to provide comments or discussion on each player, but hopefully the numbers are interesting enough as a standalone.)
ABOUT ME
Hi! I’m Tim Sevenhuysen, most recently the Director of Esports Analytics at 100 Thieves, and the founder of this website, Oracle’s Elixir. If you’re familiar with my work in esports, you’re probably a League of Legends fan, wondering why I’m putting out Valorant content. Well, it’s because a) Valorant esports analytics needs me, and b) it’s fun, and c) I’m in between employers at the moment and might as well do something productive with my time!
If you’re coming across my content for the first time, welcome! I’ve been pioneering LoL esports analytics since 2015 and working with Valorant data for over a year from inside 100 Thieves. Don’t worry about the rest of the site being LoL-focused; I just didn’t have a better place to put this for now. Maybe in future.
SKIP TO
Americas
EMEA
Pacific + EDG
Stats Definitions
I’m going to use stats you won’t be familiar with, unless you worked with me inside 100 Thieves over the past year, so I’ll start by giving an overview of what these numbers mean.
Rounds Above Replacement (RAR)
Rounds Above Replacement (RAR) is the primary player performance metric I developed at 100 Thieves. I won’t go into details on how it is calculated—that’s proprietary, at least for now—but it is a complex system that uses multivariate statistical modeling to quantify each player’s contribution to each round, while normalizing for maps and agents to ensure that certain roles don’t receive more credit than others.
Interpreting RAR is very similar to Wins Above Replacement (WAR) metrics from baseball or basketball: a player’s RAR indicates how many additional rounds that player earns for their team throughout a Bo3 series, compared to a “replacement-level” player. As a rule of thumb, a RAR above 3.0 indicates a superstar level of performance, while 0.0 is the bar for a replacement player (in other words, a player who could reasonably be replaced by an average Challengers league player with no difference to team performance).
KAST+-
You’re probably familiar with KAST (percent of rounds in which a player earns a kill or assist, survives, or is traded). KAST+- compares a player’s KAST against their expected KAST based on their agent, side (attack/defense), and map. This makes it easier to compare apples to apples, since we shouldn’t be contrasting a Sova’s KAST on Ascent against a Raze’s KAST on Split, etc.
FK and UFD
First kill rate and first death rate are popular stats in Valorant, particularly for Duelists, and for good reason. The only tweak I’ve made is to filter first deaths and only report untraded first deaths (UFD). I don’t believe that it is a countable failure for a player to entry into a site and give up the first death if their death is quickly traded out. That’s a neutral play, so I prefer not to count it against them. There’s a good argument to be made for applying the same filtering to first kills, but for now I feel FK stands on its own better than FD.
Americas
EG – Ethan
In the context of EG’s Cinderella story this year, from barely making playoffs to reaching the Finals of Masters Tokyo, the combined draw of the “Duelist” and “rookie” labels has made Demon1 a natural focus. But Ethan has been EG’s best player throughout the year, taking on an Initiator-heavy Flex role and having strong, consistent impact on round after round. If EG replicate any of their success from Tokyo, Demon1 will assuredly be generating more Jett highlights along the way, and he will deserve the credit and hype he generates. But I encourage you to look past the flash and dash and pay attention to Ethan as the tournament plays out.
KRU – keznit
Speaking of Cinderella runs… KRU’s LCQ win owed a lot to keznit stepping up and carrying. During the VCT regular season he posted a pedestrian 1.2 RAR, but in LCQ he put up a scorching 4.8, with +10.6 KAST+-. He’ll need to maintain that pace if KRU want to win any matches at Champions, and who’s to say he won’t? Maybe they’ll even go on a run!
LOUD – aspas
LOUD’s struggles at Masters prompted rumours and speculation about the roster’s future, with free agency looming, and aspas has been at the centre of those rumours. It’s not hard to see why the community fixates on him: when he’s on, he looks like one of the best Duelists in the world, and Duelists tend to land on a lot of highlight reels, receive the loudest hype from casters, and post the highest ACS numbers. On many teams, the extra focus on the Duelist isn’t truly deserved, but in aspas’s case, I believe it is. This year he has posted one of the highest KAST+- numbers in the world, to go with an excellent FK/UFD ratio.
Of course, appreciators of the more subtle parts of the game will justifiably shout out Less as an alternative choice, and they’ll hear no argument from me.
NRG – s0m
W streamer.
EMEA
FNC – Alfajer
Fnatic is so stacked with talent that you could make a good case for highlighting any of their players, but Alfajer stands out statistically with numbers that are by far the best of any Sentinel in the world. Not only does he make an impact far more rounds than expected (+8.1 KAST+-), but the size of that impact is consistently, producing the highest RAR of any player featured in this article. Honestly, Alfajer might just be the best player in the world right now. (Or maybe that’s his teammate, Leo.)
FUT – MrFaliN
It’s rare to see an IGL stand out in individual stats, but MrFaliN has managed to do just that–admittedly due in part to a balanced distribution of RARs across the entire FUT roster, showing that FUT haven’t really had a consistent individual star all year. It’s difficult to see FUT making a deep run at Champions if they have to rely on their IGL to both outcall a higher level of opposition and also try to frag out, but who knows? Maybe they’ll pull it off.
GIA – Cloud
Looking at recent performances, Fit1nho has a case to be the selection for Giants, but over the course of the year as a whole, Cloud has been a more stable contributor.
NAVI – Shao
TL – Sayf
Sayf’s peaks are as high as anyone in the world, in my opinion, but he needs to reach those heights more consistently
Pacific
DRX – MaKo
Look at those numbers. Look at that killer gaze. What a boss.
EDG – ZmjjKK
Bear in mind that these numbers only reflect Masters Tokyo, since there’s no data currently available from Chinese tournaments, but wow, this guy is fun to watch. First kill in a quarter of their rounds at an international tournament!? Dude.
PRX – something
Everyone in the world should be incredibly excited about something’s debut global appearance. His numbers in Pacific play were phenomenal, and his absence from Tokyo was disappointing. But we get to see him now! If PRX go top 2 or 3 at Champions, which is eminently reasonable to predict, then he will most likely be top candidate for tournament MVP.
ZETA – SugarZ3ro
Note: I don’t have players chosen for BLG or FPX due to lack of data availability from China.