WWE superstar and new United States champion Finn Balor was the latest guest on the After The Bell podcast to discuss a wide range of topics, including his thoughts on how NXT hindered some talents from succeeding on WWE’s main roster. Highlights from the interview are below.
How there were a lot of talents that came into NXT, but weren’t necessarily groomed for the main roster:
There’s a lot of guys that came into NXT that weren’t given the full NXT experience. I feel very fortunate that I was in Japan for a long time, moved to NXT, got re-trained in a very different WWE style, and then moved to Raw and SmackDown. After I had moved, NXT 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. Then they were kind of wrestling their same independent style or Japanese style or European style on NXT and then they were getting pulled to 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, or Triple H or Road Dogg, they were kind of explaining to me that ‘you need to make stuff mean more.’ In my indie mind, I’m like, ‘Give them explosions, give them bombs, give them the action movie.’ If every match is an action movie, who wins the Oscar? The drama. The drama is way better than the blockbuster action movie.
Says NXT’s success hindered some talents:
A lot of guys were hindered by the success of NXT in the fact that it changed its style and stopped preparing people for Raw or SmackDown. Maybe that was the difference between me, Shinsuke (Nakamura), Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn we were in that first wave of NXT guys that were really being prepared for Raw or SmackDown and they were really tinkering with our style and I was really compromising my style. Then the next generation were like, ‘just go do your thing, that’s what we want to see,’ and they weren’t maybe criticized or picked apart as much. I feel a lot of guys suffered because of that because they weren’t given the same knowledge we were given.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)