yessir

because he was good ovarall and won a major,igs,cologne,epl14 and more.electronic was a little bit worse then last year but he won 4/4 lan tournaments and one of them was a major.

Main argument comes down to how much weight people put on LAN Personally I wouldn't have him top-5, the list is "top-20 of the year" not "top-20 of the year (((on LAN)))", however I totally understand that some people (including many pros and analysts) believe online results pretty much don't matter in comparison to LAN

Electronic was inconsistent though, and he contributed less to the victories they got than Ax1le and Hobbit did to Gambit's victories. You can say "If HLTV valued big events and LAN even higher than they do ..." to put Electronic higher, but you can just as well say "If HLTV made less distinction between events ..." and put Electronic much lower. And I even said thinking he deserves to be above Ax1le and Hobbit is reasonable, I wouldn't claim him to be higher or lower either way, but S1mple said fifth place at least, and that's where he's wrong. Who between ZywOo, Sh1ro and NiKo would you say did not do far better than Electronic? Plus, you say replacing S1mple would not cost them many trophies, and that's completely unfounded. S1mple is the best player to have ever played the game, let's say you swap him with Sh1ro, the second best player of the year, and that somehow they perform equally well, Electronic would be even more important to the team, but they would only win as much as Gambit would, maybe MVPs being split equally over Sh1ro and Electronic, but those MVPs still don't put him above ZywOo or NiKo, so he remains fifth place only because Ax1le and Hobbit would be losing out on MVPs compared to S1mple. And that's even assuming they would perform equally well as they do now. With all those assumptions, Electronic still doesn't go any higher than fifth place.

Exactly, and if you put Electronic in a situation like Hobbit and Ax1le then he would be ranked like Hobbit and Ax1le, which doesn't make a difference because that's where he's ranked anyway. At most on rank 5. Magically removing the skill gap doesn't make him a better player than the top 4 players as they are. So I said that rank 5 is reasonable, any higher is ridiculous, his skill and consistency have not earned him a rank higher than 5.

They won before S1mple with a completely different line-up, just like completely different teams also win sometimes without S1mple. And the current Na'Vi is good enough to win even when S1mple has an off-day, but an off-day for S1mple is still a 1.19 rating. There's no way to know how Na'Vi would perform if they replaced him, even with Sh1ro or M0nesy or Jame, or whichever AWPer they could play with. Electronic is very good, but the only way to prove he can do it without S1mple is to do what Dev1ce did: join a different team. So far it hasn't worked out for Dev1ce, and I doubt it would work out well for Electronic.

You don't know what I am talking about

Pay enough? I wouldn't care at all as long as win millions prize money in a year. Everyone would.

Just one point - it is only because of his LAN performances that he is Top7 and b1t is Top9. If LANs weren't given huge weightage, they would be a lot lower. Apart from that, it is debatable. But I don't really agree with what you said, especially for Navi. Just compare Navi with b1t vs Navi with Flamie. And these 2 players didn't even play the important roles on the team. If replacing b1t with flamie means that Navi barely wins a couple of events, can you imagine what replacing s1mple with a worse AWPer who performs worse than Electronic statistically, means? s1mple has been a consistent 1.30+ rated player since last 4 years in a row, and people just take it for granted. If we replace that, it would be catastrophic for the team. I don't think Navi would even be in regular contention for titles and thus Electronic wouldn't have any MVPs either. Look at Niko since the past few years, for instance. Even he barely manages to win any MVPs.

Top20 so only T1 teams.