(Originally published on Sep 09, 2025)

Since the beginning of the year, Keith 'NAF' Markovic's tenuous spot on  Team Liquid's roster has generated heated debate about Liquid’s ability  to build a team. 

The once-touted rifler's performance in recent months has been  consistently poor, with few flashes of brilliance to justify his place  on Team Liquid. 

One point of contention is Team Liquid's decision  to bench Justin 'jks' Savage over NAF, as the former is perceived to  have a more palatable level of play over the latter. 

When looking  at the HLTV rating for both players since the beginning of the calendar  year, the decision to retain NAF over jks appeared trivial.

From  the beginning of 2025 until his last match for Liquid in late-March  across 35 games, jks posted a middling, but sound average HLTV rating of  1.01

NAF, similarly, across 35 maps while jks was on the roster, posted a 1.00 HLTV rating.

NAF’s performance was marginally worse than jks’.

Across  this same timespan, the lowest rating that jks had was 0.50 against  HEROIC, while the lowest rating that NAF had was 0.43 against Team  Vitality.

Conversely, the highest rating that jks achieved was a  1.8 against Wildcard, while NAF’s best performance yielded a rating of  1.67 against HEROIC.

The trend shows that NAF has slightly lower valleys than jks; across the same dataset, jks has higher peaks. 

After languishing on Liquid's bench for 4 months, jks has appeared to have a modest improvement since moving to FlyQuest; his average HLTV rating at FlyQuest sits at 1.09 across 24 games. 

Similarly, NAF has had an average rating of 1.05 across a larger dataset of 31 games in the same time period. 

The  slight improvement in both of their ratings could be attributed to the  role clash that has been opined about since jks joined Team Liquid in  2024. 

The on-paper strength of both of their rosters is worthy of  consideration; NAF - a known quantity himself - shares a team with  proven stars like Russel 'Twistzz' Van Dulken, and Guy 'Nertz' Iluz; jks  stands alone as the most successful player on the FlyQuest roster by a  large margin. 

The 4 months that jks spent on the bench could have  potentially been put to use to test how the Australian would have  slotted into the line-up where he could play his role without having to  compromise.

For the past 3 months, Liquid have only won nearly 36% percent of the maps they've played.

While  it's ill-advised to live in the past, it might be worthwhile for Liquid  to revisit the decision to keep NAF; a marginal upgrade may have been  laying in wait the entire time.