The WWE Draft 2023: Night 2 Mindy’s Bakery Raw 1/5/23
 

So the draft takes place on 28th April and 1st May and we’ll probably get the usual “everybody in” approach.

What do you think we’ll see? Any guys/girls you’re hoping to see on particular brand/called up?

Kevin Owens and The Miz get drafted almost every single time. I hope they do not change shows.

LA Knight could benefit from a 3-hour show where they can flush out his personality even more.

Nakamura has been with Smackdown since he made his main roster debut. It'd be interesting if they moved him to RAW.

If they're serious about the brand spit, I hope there isn't any silly exchange of brand specific championships. I am still not over how cringeworthy the belt exchange was between Lynch and Flair. If you want to market your women's title as world championships, name them something better.

I also hope they split the tag team straps since there are so many solid tag team units on both shows. It'd make more sense to have separate belts for each show. If not, unify them already.

I really want to see them commit to a brand split like they did in the early 00s. It'll force them to get more creative and make new stars in the process.

Robert Lashley will go to SD to fight Ramon Reigns for a few months

You say your name is the Tribal Chief and you love to fight. Well, I say you're the Tribal chief and you're a bathturd!

Judgment Day to SD

Imperium to RAW

LA Knight to RAW

Seth Rollins to SD

Vintage!

I have to lol when they hype up "WHICH TEAMS WILL BE SPLIT IN THE DRAFT?" only for the rules to end up being that teams and stables can be drafted together.

I mean the rules kinda have to be that way. The very first draft had Vince draft D-Von right after Flair took Bubba. If this draft were a shoot there's no reason you'd ever let the other side build a tag division. So you either need to have random elements of the draft, or let teams be picked together.

But then the other side of it is you get dumb shit like The New Day splitting up because apparently SmackDown decided, nah, we don't want this heavily decorated 3-man stable, just give us Big E, thanks.

Remembering the several years of drafts where the picks were meant to be random but you had to win a match to get a pick for your brand

Very first year they did that, heel SmackDown champ Edge cheats to win a draft pick only to be terrified to see Great Khali join SmackDown. Shouldn't the heel champ be throwing the match in hopes of sending better competition away?

2004 was the only one that really made sense to me. Each side got like 5 or 6 picks out of a tumbler and that's it. Allowed them to flip a few big names around along with a few midcarders they wanted to push, broke up stables in a logical way etc

Yep. Not a fan that they move so many parts around. You end up moving half a division which means you’ve not freshened anything up.

I’d be happy with something like 5 saves, 5 steals, and 5 drafts from NXT/Free Agents. Limits the moving parts.

I came up with an idea that they could do the draft by having Raw and SmackDown essentially “bid” for talent. Each show gets assigned so many draft points. You then have to bid more of these points for certain talent.

This allows you to not lead with your hottest. You could open SmackDown with Sami and Owens finding out that they’re trading shows and when they lose the belts that’s it for them as a team. Montez Ford gets a much higher offer on him than Angelo Dawkins, which causes friction. Roman tells Paul to put a call in. Heyman asks Roman if he’s sure he wants to do this. After a tag team match, Jimmy Uso finds out that big offers were placed on him from Raw and SmackDown, but he’s staying on SmackDown. Jey Uso gets the same offer from Raw, but when SmackDown’s comes up, it says “No Bid.” Roman has essentially exiled Jey.

You could also do cute things like Dominik getting a massive offer from SmackDown, but Raw has had enough of him and doesn’t play for him at all. Bianca Belair could get the single biggest bid of the draft.

I dunno, I was just playing around with the idea.

VEER IS COMING

To Smackdown

Remember the reaction of the Fox war room when they got Natalya? Priceless.

i like they do it this year the same time as the real draft, the nfl draft.

WWE are apparently considering brand exclusive PPVs again. The way they structure them, I can definitely see it being more viable than it was in the past.

I actually didn't mind the brand-exclusive PPV's from the early 2000's. It gave a lot of midcarders/cruiserweights etc a chance to actually have meaningful matches, and gave that variety to the shows, without big names being left off.

But after twenty years of inconsistencies, I doubt this draft will mean anything and within two weeks they'll have people "invading" other shows, or "final picks before the rosters are locked" or whatever nonsense they come up with.

My only hope for it, and this is a long-shot because he hasn’t seen much use in it so far, is that Triple H might have more to do with it creatively.

Its solid in theory but I fear it would just result in more of the special attraction guys working more often.

Maybe theres an upside in that as well but there all ageing now.

Minor correction: USA Network executives

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The War Rooms were the best lol

Everyone is speculating that the World Heavyweight Title is going to either Cody, Seth or Drew. It would be kind of fun if they all ended up on the same show as Roman, and were therefore out.

lol when Bork Lasnur gets the new title.

I don’t have a problem with Brock getting the new belt at all.

I think the only one they cannot put the new title on is Cody. The whole narrative is Cody came back to WWE to win the title that was taken from Dusty, not to win some brand new World Championship with zero lineage.

I think Lashley would work best since he never lost the WWE title clean either time, and never got a shot at Roman after that, but any upper level babyface but Cody would work.

Omos is clearly.goimg to be champion.

I really hope it isn’t going to be Seth or Drew.

So I haven't really commented much on Cody losing at mania very much, because I wanted to give it time to think about it, and to see where they go directly afterwards. There was an arguement to be made that Cody winning would have been a little to easy. And it would better mirror his father's career if he had to chase roman just as dusty chased flair.

I was starting to buy into the idea that it could work. I wasn't completely sold, as it's incredibly ambitious, but I wasn't writing off roman retaining as a miostake.

That changes with the introduction of a new title. It doesn't matter how good the story is or how over cody is. Cody winning the title will never, ever mean as much as when there was one, undisputed champion. Because he won't be THE champion. He'll be A champion.

If this was the plan, Cody should have won at wrestlemania.

Pretty sure Drew is on the way out.

If this was the plan, they definitely should have called an audible and had Sami Zayn fight Roman at WM and beat him.

Instead they flushed away their hottest storyline in years to go with Cody... and then didn't "finish the story" there either....

And now instead of being able to at least try to rekindle one or the other story for the next WM they have just completely flushed their whole 1000+ day story/build down the drain.

In order for Cody to "finish the story", he needs to win the title his dad never won. Not the newly minted WHC title. It would very disappointing if Cody ends up winning it and they present it as a focal point of his career.

Gonna laugh when they unify again. Cody wins new title and wins the rumble again and fights roman for all the gold.

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:rofl:

<marquee>https://imagehost9.online-image-edit...81NlgwRMmI.gif</marquee>

This actually wouldn’t be the worst story in the world. I doubt it’s what they’re doing, but using this belt as a story to fuel the ultimate Roman/Cody is not the worst way about getting to that.

I’m not feeling Cody in that spot though. I think they’ve created this so don’t need to have him as the ultimate guy.

The more I think of the new belt, the "angrier" I get. Like, damn... ok if you want a new belt. Just call it something else and treat it with higher respect and prestige than the IC/US level, just don't pretend that it is supposed to be an "equal" to Reigns belt(s).

Now we are just back to two world titles where one is clearly on the top guy, while the other is several levels below and could be stuck on just about anyone because it doesn't really matter.

That was always the problem with the two belts. Very seldom were they actually "equal". They would go back and forth with "this one is the more important one" and it would just devalue winning either.

I didn't mind two world champions in those first 3 or 4 years of the brand split when brands were actually kept entirely separate and basically treated like their own promotion.

Once they started having people arbitrarily switching shows whenever it was convenient, they needed to merge the titles. Hilarious that the "World Heavyweight Title" continued for years after the brand split was killed off on TV, it reeked of midcard.

And there's no reason to expect they won't just have everyone appearing everywhere again.

The way Triple H talked about it, it could be presented as a different tier title to Roman’s. That it could be defended against anyone, anywhere, etc. kind of made it sound like it could just headline PPVs Roman isn’t on.

It sounds to me like they don’t plan on having Roman drop the belts anytime soon and they need a placeholder while he does whatever. Which means he’s gonna have it probably for at least another year. Probably more. Which sounds pretty awful tbf.

Could be. Or it could be misdirection and just build towards SummerSlam.