“[Zven] is giving me so much s— every day, it’s funny.” – C9 Inero

HotSpawn sat down with Cloud9’s (C9) LTA Assistant Coach, Nick “Inero” Smith, to talk about C9’s success in the home stretch of the season, how he went from an imploding org to one of the best teams in NA, and his favorite nickname.

Inero chats nicknames, metas, Zven’s antics, and more

Cloud9 has been on a tear in the final chapter of LTA North Split 2, and despite the hilarious Grim Reaper memes he was posting about being an ill omen for an organization, Inero’s presence seems to have done a lot for Cloud9. We briefly chatted with Inero between weeks of play, getting his more measured impressions on the biggest changes of this year, and the best monikers his unruly players have given him over the years.

Nick James: First of all, congratulations on the success you guys have been having this split. But I feel like I have to kick off our interview by doing a bit of a rewind. The last time we got to chat, it was at the end of 2024, when Immortals was confirmed to be out of LCS, and you had a very honest conversation with me about the fact that you weren’t sure if you’d still be in NA LoL come 2025. However, it was pretty quickly announced that you’d be going to Cloud9 to coach alongside Reapered, and here you are, and it’s going great! So, what was the process of coming on board C9 like? Walk me through the offseason a bit and how this came about.

Nick “Inero” Smith: I mean, the offseason part for me was pretty chill, everything happened decently quickly. Everybody already knew Immortals was out. I had reached out to C9 at the start of the year about wanting to work, and Jack (C9 CEO) had told me that there’s not really going to be anything until like 2025.

I was just like: “yeah, whatever, you know it’s like back of my mind type thing, can exist”, and then C9 just reached out to me in the offseason.

So, obviously I’m looking at options. I have head coach options, but it would again be the usual of playing for a playoff team, not a team that’s actually trying to win right now. Or a team that’s set up to win right now. So, working at C9, I didn’t really care what my job was like; I wanted to be helping a team in some way that was looking to win, and actually looking to win right now.

I did not want to be on a “starter org” where we’re trying to make it through. I’ve been through that enough, and I’ve been through enough of those starting up and once they get going just exploding.

So I wanted to be somewhere established, so it’s nice and it’s been good! It was nice with the fact that when we were at the beginning of the year, we were like “Oh, we’re going to win,” and we were like third, fourth place last split—that was disappointing. Instead of a like, “F— yeah, we got third, fourth, that’s good, boys! Nice!” It’s a, “F—, we should have been better, like, why did we lose this?” So yeah, it’s been nice! The offseason process was nice, everything was chill. Chill and easy.

Nick: Alright, keeping things a little bit retro, how are you feeling about the meta? We’ve seen Riot make some big moves since moving away from lane swaps, and we’ve been back to a much more standard meta for a while now. How do you feel about that, and do you think that the move back to classic League has been favorable for you guys?

Inero: Yeah, I mean, I liked the, like, lane swap type of stuff. It’s honestly better for us, because I think it’s just so good for us to 1v1. It’s just good for us that it’s changed back to just standard laning, but I like the lane swaps, just like in a general sense. I mean, I think the reasoning for trying to bring it back to the, like, standard idea of play that people play in their solo queue games is a whatever excuse. I don’t know—I like it, because it makes it easier for our team overall. I think the change is, like, whatever. It’s still League of Legends at the end of the day. Only the first, like, few minutes of the game have changed, and after that, it turns into swapping again anyway.

Makes sense. Keeping with the big-scale format changes we’re now settled into and are soon to see on the international stage, how’s Fearless settling with you as a coach?

Inero: I think it’s good. It makes practice a lot easier, and it’s a lot easier to play with a lot more varied comps. There’s a lot more opportunity to, like, win a draft situation and surprise a team. There’s a lot more benefit to playing all these different champions all the time. I think it’s cool. I think the only downside right now is just that the formats are so weird, all over the place, to do it. Like we’re prepping for Fearless right now, but we’re playing best-of-ones for three weeks, so half of our scrims weren’t even Fearless. So it’s really weird. I like that Fearless has been added, and it’s been changed. I was pretty skeptical at first because the academy version of it was pretty whatever. So I wasn’t sure if, like, going full Fearless would make it some amazing thing and be great, but it’s actually been really nice. So I like it, and it’s really fun to, like, pull advantages from that. I’ve gotten used to it pretty easily, personally.

Nick: Nice. Alright, the next question is about your many nicknames. You are a man who has been given many humorous nicknames by his players over the years, and a couple of them have made their way onto broadcasts. Out of all your years coaching, what’s your favorite nickname, and is it “Doctor Robot-Nick Smith”?

Inero: It is not “Dr. Robot-Nick Smith” [laughs] Oh… let me think of these… because, like, there’s recency bias, you know? So yeah, when I helped DIG, it was “The Local Legend,” which was funny because it just sounds so stupid. It’s such a dumb name. Golden Guardians was “The Bald Eagle” because it was bald and American. Now we have “Nicholas Capitalists Smithless,” which Zven is calling me all the time—”Nicholas Draftless Smithless,” “Nicholas One Jobless Smithless”—all these types of things. He’s just giving me so much shit every day, it’s funny. I think “Local Legend” is the funniest one. I like “Local Legend” the most, I think, because it just makes zero sense, and it came out of nowhere. Oh, I don’t know, that one’s pretty funny—so shout out to Dig Isles for that one. That was funny.