With the RBM awards coming to a close, it should come as no surprise that the winner of the Sasha Award, the MVP award named after him, is Aleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev, particularly after we crowned him the best offensive and defensive player of 2021. The Rush B Media awards are awards chosen by our staff members to be given to players in a number of categories, and we’ve already crowned our best coach and best rifler. Given that we’ve already talked at great length about s1mple’s fantastic statistics that he put up over the past year, we asked members of our staff to tell us why they felt s1mple was deserving of the Sasha Award of 2021.
There was no way that we could do an MVP award and not give it to s1mple this year. What he’s done on NaVi even over the last few years with the back and forth, fighting with Zywoo for number 1, whereas this year it felt like he said “enough is enough” and kicked it up a notch, into a gear we’ve never seen before. Whether we give more credence to his performance as a result of the addition of b1t and NaVi as a whole becoming a monster that are unplayable majority of the time you can probably debate. However when you look at his production while playing in the same system as Electronic and b1t who could easily be star players on practically any other team, it’s undeniable that S1mple is the X factor and the Most Valuable Player in Counter-Strike this year.
Liam Slevin, Senior Writer
Honestly, s1mple is the only player you can rank without looking at his stats whatsoever. It’s the easiest task in CSGO history to rank s1mple as #1 this year. It was so easy that for the first time in forever, nobody fell for the baiters that tried to say that s1mple would be second or third.
Andrew Hicks, Graphic Designer
You don’t need to win every LAN event you attend and carry your team to a spotless Major win to be the Most Valuable Player, but it certainly helps. NaVi’s dominance now is the largest gap to 2nd place that we’ve seen since Astralis won back to back to back majors… and that dominance is spearheaded by the greatest of all time, s1mple. It’s only now that the world’s best player is on the world’s best team, but together, they seem unstoppable.
Daniel Khurgin, Junior Writer & Social Media Manager
2021 was another step in s1mple’s evolution as the greatest player to ever touch the game. He continues to reshape the standard at a professional level and there is truly no way to gague a proper ceiling for him. It is s1mple’s world, and we are just living in it.
Lukas DeWitt, COO & Editor-In-Chief
s1mple was considered the best in the world before being on a team that was capable of winning big events consistently. With his incredible impact on the server alongside the rest of the NaVi squad, it’s more or less impossible to give this award to anyone but s1mple.
Adam Conway, Editor
2021 RBM Awards:
Sasha Award: s1mple
All-RBM Team: Coming soon
