Nukeduck on TH's goals: "We'll try our best in Summer, and see how we can adapt that into 2027"

2026 has not been kind to . After finishing dead last in the Spring Season, the squad limped into summer following several changes, but with expectations from fans and analysts remaining low. Unfortunately, the team kicked off the LEC 2026 Summer Season with a loss to , who swept them 2-0.

Nevertheless, Heretics must carry on, hoping to redeem itself and push towards greater heights, especially after major changes to its coaching staff and a small lineup shake-up that saw the arrival of a new AD carry.

In an exclusive interview, former head coach Erlend "Nukeduck" Våtevik Holm, who joined the team ahead of summer, sat down with Sheep Esports to discuss his new tenure with the struggling squad and his vision for Heretics' future as they look to reverse the downward spiral they have found themselves in.

Erlend "Nukeduck" Våtevik Holm: “When it comes to the series as a whole, we're just going to take a look at it again. Of course, we already have points that we want to go over as a staff and present to the players. Aside from that, nothing really too special. You know, we just lost our first match—it happens. We shouldn’t be too sad about it. We’ve just got to keep working.

Nukeduck: I would say my expectations would just be to make the team better. In a way where we’re able to show that Heretics is on an upwards trajectory. Of course, when I took this team over, it was already pretty mental boomed. It’s that kind of 10th place mentality, where everyone is in a downward spiral. That happens when teams keep on losing without being able to figure out why they’re losing. Some people will point towards one element, others toward some other aspects or players, and so they spiral down.

So yeah, my goal is to revert this and put my players on an upward trend. I would say it’s been going fine thus far, but of course, our first stage match didn’t go well. We’ll just keep trying to get better. I do think we did already get a little bit better—but it’s still not nearly enough.

Nukeduck: Of course, the fact that they can swap at 20 seconds is of course weird, because you're doing the swap and then you also have to figure out how far you can push the player's champion pool. That's something that I'm not super comfortable with right now, because I think we need to play some champions we know. We're a lower tier team, and we need to figure out some champions we can play at a high level first and try to use them.

When it came to the last game's draft, I didn’t really feel like they had three counter lanes. The focal point was toplane, right? Gnar needed to survive against the Ignite Akali, and that was the crucial part of the draft. We did not execute correctly there. We wasted tempo to go top after Gnar TP'd back, and then we let them invade our top jungle and kill him.

Those were the main mistakes of the game. After that, Gnar is just playing and hoping that they don't kill him. Whenever they want to kill him, they can kill him. At that point we just have to hope they make a mistake.

But yeah, those are the things we'll be looking at from this game. But it was very weird. We had wards, we just didn't place them, and then they caught us off guard at the red buff. We were very unaware in game of what they could do.

Nukeduck: First, why I wasn't on a team: I didn't find any roster or offer that was enticing for me. I talked to some of the European teams, but I didn’t feel like I would fit with their projects. Being a coach is very time-expensive and taxing, so you want to be rewarded for it, right?

Regarding what I’ve been doing: I was traveling a bit, just having vacation, not keeping up too much with League. During that time, I was sort of talking to some people here and there, looking for potential projects. I wasn't in a rush to find a team.

And as for the reason that made me join Heretics: Mithy. We’re good friends, and I like working with him. The owners told my agent and I that they’d fly him in so that we could work together again. They told me how we’d try our best to make things work in summer, and then reassess the project once the split is over so that we can do better in 2027, since what we could do for summer was rather limited.

I have a two-year contract, so the goal is to try and do as good as we can now, and see how we can adapt that into next year afterward. We just kind of have to hope things work out for now.

But yeah, I knew I had a guy I could rely on in the staff, so I knew I would enjoy my time and that it’d be fulfilling. This is not a short-term thing, we’re here to try and make a push to improve Heretics in the long run.

Nukeduck: I think they will let me and the staff do the decisions that we think we need to do. When it comes to all that, there are a lot of moving pieces, and we'll deal with that after summer. We'll see what we can do, and we'll see what we have to spend, what players we have, how far they are developed at the end of this season. That's also one of our goals, to develop the players we have, to get the best out of them, and then see how far we can take them as individual players.

Nukeduck: Yeah. The team was objectively the worst in the league last split, so we have work to do to get better. Everyone can have their own expectations—mine are that we keep getting better. If we stagnate for some reason, then we’ll have to figure out why that’s the case and fix it. We’ll see how it goes.

Nukeduck: KC is a very strong team. We're going to do prep now based on what just happened in this series for that series. We're going to try our best.”