Thorin: "Donk does with the machine gun what s1mple did with the AWP"

CS2 analyst Duncan "Thorin" Shields has declared Danila "donk" Kryshkovets of Team Spirit as the greatest rifler in the history of the discipline. In a recent podcast, he discussed the player's statistics and compared him to Aleksandr "s1mple" Kostylev.

"There was a Reddit post ranking players, and people started saying, 'Now ZywOo has the same rating as donk, so he must be the best player of the year.' However, if you understand how roles work in CS, such metrics only highlight how impressive donk's results are. What are we even talking about? ZywOo plays either as a sniper or a mid-round rifler — he doesn't lead the charge. What donk does is significantly harder. It seems people don't fully grasp how incredible it is.

Additionally, during that dreadful match between Spirit and G2, you could see what happens to the team when donk is off his game. For magixx and chopper, it was a nightmare, and zont1x seemed to want to sink into the ground. The game became twice as hard for them immediately.

Donk doesn’t just win duels... Sure, nobody can consistently be the first to engage and kill two opponents at once, but he’ll get one frag and inflict damage on the second. Whoever follows donk in such a situation will finish off the enemy — one hit will be enough. So, he makes frags that don’t even show up in his stats.

I’ve always said that the most important stat is the average number of kills per round [KPR]. And you can’t artificially inflate it. Donk has played ten tournaments, and in six of them, his KPR was above 0.88 — while leading or second to engage opponents. It’s simply phenomenal. He does with an automatic weapon what s1mple did with an AWP. At two tournaments, he averaged more than one frag per round. And this is with an automatic! We recently lamented that for the past 6-7 years, CS stars have been mostly snipers who get all the frags. And now, what we’ve been waiting for has happened — the best rifler has arrived!"

As of the first half of 2024, donk was recognised as one of the top three contenders for the Player of the Year award. His main competitors were Ilya "m0NESY" Osipov from G2 Esports and Team Vitality's sniper Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbaut. In 2024, Kryshkovets earned four MVP awards.