Finn Balor saw NXT changing but not necessarily in the way that best served its performers long-term.
After signing with WWE in May 2014, Balor joined the NXT brand, making his debut that September. During his two years there before moving to Raw, Finn would hold the NXT Championship for what was then the longest reign in the title's history. He would return to NXT in October 2019, staying again for nearly two years and holding the NXT Championship for a second time.
During a recent appearance on WWE After The Bell with Corey Graves, Balor said that he feels as though a lot of talents were not given the full NXT experience, meaning that they weren't properly prepared for Raw and SmackDown, instead being allowed to work their previous style.
"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," Balor said.
Continuing on, Balor notes how the most recent generation of stars were perhaps not submerged in the WWE style and made to compromise in the same way he was eight years ago. He argues that this is likely a result of the success of NXT.
"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," he said.
Elsewhere during the interview, Balor explained why he believes NXT 2.0 was needed. Click here to read his comments.
Balor recently won the United States Championship from Damian Priest and is set to defend it in a rematch on March 5 at Madison Square Garden.
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