According to news portal Dexerto, Patrick «es3tag» Hansen is close to formalizing a move to NIP. The Danish cyber athlete is expected to replace Linus «LNZ» Holteng, who has been playing for the team for the past six months after joining from the Young Ninjas youth roster.
Dextero's source reports that es3tag could appear as early as the BLAST Premier Fall Final tournament in Copenhagen in late November. NIP will probably be allowed to change the roster shortly before the start of the competition, but because of this it will have to start from a lower position on the grid.
Hansen will move to NIP from Complexity, whose management put him up for transfer two weeks ago. The team that was built around Danish cybersports player Benjamin «blameF» Bremer has fallen apart after a series of failures, the latest of which was the fact that the team failed to qualify for PGL Major Stockholm.
Despite the fact that es3tag was showing very promising results before the pandemic, the online era was a period of failure for him: after leaving Heroic, he changed several teams, but neither Astralis, Cloud9 nor Complexity lasted more than a few months. Interestingly, he'll be playing NIP alongside former Astralis teammate Nikolai «device» Ridtz.