Finn Balor Feels Some WWE Talents Were Hindered By Success Of NXT

WWE

Finn Balor has recalled NXT changing over time, believing that numerous WWE talents have been hindered by the brand’s success.

Speaking on WWE After The Bell, Balor argued that after he left NXT in 2016, a lot of talent weren’t given the ‘full NXT experience’.

Feeling like the brand stopped preparing stars for the WWE main roster, Balor said:

“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.”

Balor returned to NXT in October 2019 and returned to the main roster in July 2021, two months before the ‘NXT 2.0’ reboot.

The former NXT Champion defeated Damian Priest for the US Title on Monday’s edition of Raw. WWE has announced his first title defence, which you can read about right here.

Stay up to date with every WWE title change of 2022 at this link.

Transcription via POST Wrestling. 

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• Finn Balor
• main roster
• nxt
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