Subhojeet Mukherjee on March 4, 2022
Finn Balor is a former 2-time NXT Champion and has competed in high profile matches since his return to NXT back in 2019. Before that, Balor was working in the main roster for a few years, where he was not utilized well. It seems he opened up about his time in WWE NXT as well.
Finn Balor saw a lot of success during his two runs in NXT, winning the NXT Championship and also competing in numerous high-quality matches. He is one of the more successful NXT call-ups to the main roster, but that is not the case for everyone.
While speaking on the After The Bell podcast, Finn Balor talked about how the newer NXT Superstars never got the full experience that NXT had to offer. Balor added that he feels NXT suffered from its own success.
“There’s a lot of guys that came into NXT that weren’t given the full NXT experience, right? I feel I was very fortunate that I was in Japan for a long time. I moved to NXT, I got retrained in a very different WWE style and then moved onto Raw and to SmackDown. After I had moved, NXT had kind of developed its own style of wrestling and kind of changed and it wasn’t really preparing people for Raw or SmackDown.
It was just putting people on NXT and then they were just kind of wrestling, they’re saying independent style or Japanese style or European style on NXT and then they were getting pulled onto Raw or SmackDown but they hadn’t been given these key nuggets of information by people like Matt Bloom or Terry Taylor at the Performance Center that — you know, Triple H or Road Dogg. They were kind of explaining to me that you need to make stuff mean more.
My indie mind (would’ve) been like, ‘Hey, give them explosions, give them bombs. Give them action movies.’ But, if every match is an action movie, who wins the Oscar? The drama, you know? So like, the drama is obviously way better than the blockbuster Hollywood action movie.
And definitely I feel like a lot of guys were hindered by the success of NXT in the fact that it changed its style and then stopped preparing people for Raw and SmackDown and maybe that was the difference between maybe me, Shinsuke (Nakamura), Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, that we were in that first kind of wave of NXT guys that were actually being prepared for Raw or SmackDown and they were really tinkering with our style and I was really compromising my style — going back to that word earlier — and then the next generation that came in were kind of just like, ‘Ah, just go do your thing man. That’s what we wanna see’ and they weren’t maybe as criticized as much, picked apart as much and I feel like a lot of guys suffered because of that because they weren’t given the same knowledge that we were given.”
As seen on this week’s episode of Monday Night RAW, Finn Balor defeated Damian Priest to win the WWE United States Championship. Balor is also set to defend his title against Priest at Madison Square Garden in a rematch on March 5th. We will have to wait and see if Balor will be able to retain his title or not.
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March 4, 2022 2:09 pm
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