Luminosity benches Stellar and Thief from VALORANT lineup

The players are allowed to trial for other teams.

Screengrab via Luminosity

Luminosity Gaming has removed Brendan “Stellar” McGrath and Brady “Thief” Dever from its active VALORANT roster, the North American organization announced today.

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Both of the players are now free to pursue tryouts and explore offers with other teams, according to Luminosity’s director of talent Charlie Yang. “Any team that picks them up will be fortunate to have them; it is our loss that not every team composition works out,” the statement reads. It’s unknown if they’re tied to a buyout clause.

Stellar and Thief had been playing VALORANT for Luminosity since the organization entered the professional scene in August 2020. They most notably helped the team win the Nerd Street Gamers Winter Championship over Sentinels in January. But Luminosity didn’t play well in the qualifiers for the VCT Masters Reykjavík, the $600,000 global VALORANT tournament, and failed to qualify for it.

Both players tweeted that they’re open to exploring new opportunities in their careers. “I’m now allowed to look for other opportunities with other teams, have most of my experience on duelist but willing to fill any role,” Thief said.

“I am allowed to actively trial and look for other teams to play with. I play pretty much anything but duelists. Also was IGLing for a large amount of time but I don’t have to,” Stellar said.

With these roster changes, Luminosity’s VALORANT lineup has been depleted to just three players: Kaleb “moose” Jayne, Diondre “YaBoiDre” Bond, and Alex “aproto” Protopapas, who’s the only player remaining from the team’s original lineup.


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Leonardo Biazzi
Staff writer and CS:GO lead. Leonardo has been passionate about games since he was a kid and graduated in Journalism in 2018. Before Leonardo joined Dot Esports in 2019, he worked for Brazilian outlet Globo Esporte. Leonardo also worked for HLTV.org between 2020 and 2021 as a senior writer, until he returned to Dot Esports and became part of the staff team.