Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Guycott
... because they have done soooo well with the likes of Kana, Nakamura, Gallows & Anderson, and KENTA. Even Devitt is debatable at the moment. Hell, the only person who got half a chance from there is AJ Styles, and his trip to Japan was pretty much to scrub TNA stink off of him.
In fact, it is specifically the treatment of Shinsuke Nakamura more than anyone else that is the biggest barometer of my judgment. The man should have been WWE Champion at least once at this point, especially when his stock was up. He already paid his dues in his career, and WWE has this "well, you need to start over with us" mentality for most people. At this point, they've just established to the fans that he isn't as good as even the hype they themselves gave him. He is in a random midcard tag team. This after being an OVER AS FUCK babyface and the surprisingly glorious "no shpeak Engrish" heel turn that the company apparently didn't know what to do with. Why multiply that by, say, a whole entire other roster?
The biggest hurdle I can see, if this were ever any kind of possible to maintain a sustained relationship like New Japan currently has with Ring of Honor, is that WWE would be pretty adverse to putting any of the New Japan talent over in any type of matchups people would want to see. What I mean is, there is no way we'd get a Cena vs Okada type of match. We wouldn't get GoD vs Usos. It would be a series of squash matches of lesser card members eating pins for the stars.
Also, Liger already had a WWE match with Tyler Breeze. You wouldn't remember it now, because WWE has done a fantastic job of burying Breeze over the years since then. It wasn't as great as Zayn vs Nakamura, but obviously Liger is legendary, and he gets called in to establish that he's such a big deal you need to bring in Liger... and you end up doing nothing with that? The hell, WWE?!
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Well, in their defense (which I wouldn’t normally do), Gallows & Anderson suck, Finn Balor is a charisma vacuum and Nakamura was never going to get that sort of push in the last year of his contract. It’s weird they haven’t been doing more with him lately, and my latest theory is that I think they know he’s leaving. Otherwise, you’d think they’d dangle more of a carrot in front of him. I suspect he is going back to New Japan. Well, I guess AEW is possible, since the more I think about it, the more I realize has hasn’t been used for anything other than putting people over outside that first win he and Rusev got as a tag team.