the mass-lb trade makes perfect sense. they both grabbed the most valuable players available, but not exactly the best suited for them.<br /><br />mass and nostar is defensive overkill. when sxp experimented with mass&#039; position, he played a shaky 07, then had a breakthrough performance defending 30. it would be unwise from him to change what worked well, but that&#039;d mean star playing 2d or mid. the former could be really taxing on coll as the sole runner, the latter was tried last season when he fronted for rus... and the results were far from stellar, star seemed to hate playing mid and underperformed.<br />now he&#039;s got mike and noob. the raw power levels of spe dropped some, hardly any doubt about that. however the lineup seems better tuned. the doomsayers probably expect mike to run again and noob falling through on mid, but that&#039;s what was said about knf last season, wasn&#039;t it? and those of us with a brain knew mike would play mid, so guess where he&#039;s probably going to end up. mass is more disciplined than strangle and he won&#039;t have any trouble communicating with mike, so expect spe having a defensive zone larger than russia. i don&#039;t know what to expect from noob, but i bet he can get useful, even just as distraction for mike&#039;s pushes. and their fourth is reck, how the hell did he bubble through so low? this team is very capable if played right... if tt ever gets back on. they&#039;re fuckin dicked on nj, sorry.<br /><br />now let&#039;s have a look at dmr. original lineup of lb+mike+noob+bulb. let me ask you, who is the defender in here? surely not mike, the alltime record holder for flags per round and the spiritual mvp of last season for his mid performance. and lb ended 3rd in flags scored last season with ridiculous, unparalelled efficiency. he&#039;s a beast runner and his monovision focuses him on the task, sticking him in the net is a waste. not mentioning he gets overconfident there, shows off and leaks flags. so how about noob? when i watched him last season, i saw he could shoot, but he&#039;s moving around looking for frags too much and sometimes gets dumb ideas. so yeah bulb, people want to see you defend! this team was catastrophically imbalanced, too much offense and not enough defence.<br />after the trade ... yeah, everyone can see what is shaping up here. star can camp base again, there&#039;s probably going to be some experimenting with lb and coll switching mid/o. sounds like good times ahead.<br /><br />i think people are whining because they were afraid of lb, then his draft picks seemed chaotic and badly planned... and yet suddenly he has the powerhouse team everyone was scared of. this is yet another case of &quot;star gets traded? you just handed him the mb, idiots.&quot; it&#039;s getting old. actually... i&#039;d love to see the day when other caps wisen up and do the same thing. strangle holds two powerful european runners and lacks any sort of mid, he [b]needs[/b] to come up with something.