Former Sentinels VALORANT captain and current G2 captain ShahZam has offered further context on the recent controversy he started yesterday involving Sentinels and shroud. Unlike some fans had thought, ShahZam meant to only take shots at Sentinels and didn’t mean to offend the Canadian streamer with his tweets.
Part of the community thought the opposite after ShahZam and Sentinels CEO Rob Moore’s discussion on Twitter yesterday. The debate got heated after the executive denied he had promised ShahZam a spot for 2023 if he agreed to play with shroud. Later yesterday, however, ShahZam made it clear that his tweets were only targeted at Sentinels and actually praised the former CS:GO pro for his work ethic, on top of saying shroud exceed expectations at the LCQ.
Related: ShahZaM explains why he took shots at Sentinels over skit video
“My tweet had nothing to do with taking a jab at shroud,” ShahZam said during his livestream. “He was asked to play, he came in, he wanted to play, and gave his all. He outperformed everyone’s expectations.”
With shroud filling in for Sentinels at the LCQ, the once-best VALORANT team in North America didn’t reach their goals. ShahZam and crew crashed out of the tournament with a top-six placing following just one victory against Shopify Rebellion and losses to The Guard and 100 Thieves.
Despite all the hard work shroud put in, ShahZam thinks it wasn’t appropriate to sign the Canadian streamer because everybody saw them as a “meme” team that was more focused on creating content rather than qualifying for Champions and finishing the year on a high note.
“Going into LCQ, Sentinels [was] a fucking meme,” ShahZam said. “People thought that all we did was stream and that we didn’t care about winning. Everyone thought that we were a fucking meme, we just made money, we just cared about streams and we didn’t want to win. That was the narrative around our team. LCQ was our last opportunity to change that before franchising… bringing in shroud, compared to an existing pro, kind of pushed that narrative forward. That was the only thing. It further enforced that narrative that we didn’t care about winning.”
What ShahZam has said during his livestream should be enough to bury this discussion, unless shroud chimes in to say whether he felt insulted or not and offers his own view of what happened with Sentinels. The 2023 season is about to start for pro teams and both ShahZam and Sentinels will have to leave what happened in the past to focus on reaching their goals for this year.
