Sentinels has signed former Cloud9 player Rahul “curry” Nemani to its VALORANT roster today following Bryan “pANcada” Luna’s free agency move.
Curry will officially join the roster as a substitute, taking the sixth-man role previously occupied by Jordan “Zellsis” Montemurro. Due to circumstances including visa issues, Zellsis played on the starting roster in place of pANcada for most of the offseason and all of the VCT Americas Kickoff event. Sentinels posted a very high win percentage with Zellsis starting and also qualified for Masters Madrid in the process.
Since the start of 2021, curry first joined T1 when the organization still competed in VALORANT, after switching over from Counter-Strike. In 2022, curry joined C9, swapping places with Korean player Son “xeta” Seon-ho, who was the original foundation of T1’s first roster in VCT Pacific.
At the end of the 2022 season, curry left C9 but briefly returned this past offseason as a stand-in for wippie at the Red Bull Home Ground event, where he and C9 reached the grand finals and took Fnatic to five maps. With wippie’s departure from C9 earlier this week, some fans picked out curry as a potential replacement, but he has gone ahead and taken the Sentinels sixth-man role. C9’s fifth is still undetermined at this time.
The sixth-man role opening up and Zellsis securing the full-time starting job are a result of Sentinels telling pANcada earlier today that he’s free to explore his options with other teams, with no restrictive buyout.
With curry’s extensive VCT and stand-in experience, he’ll be relied upon for any last-minute changes in the Sentinels roster. Last year saw a number of shuffles in the Sentinels starting roster, which included TenZ taking time off for health reasons. Sentinels take on Team Heretics in round one at Masters Madrid on March 15.
