The New Day’s Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods made a surprise appearance on this week’s NXT and wound up getting booked to face Pretty Deadly for the NXT Championships this Saturday at NXT Deadline. Shawn Michaels then took part in a media conference call on Thursday and explained how the idea to bring Kingston and Woods down to the developmental brand came about and how long they intend to stay on the brand. While the two did challenge The Usos for the Undisputed WWE Tag Team Championships in mid-November, they’ve otherwise been relegated to SmackDown’s midcard ever since Big E suffered his broken neck earlier this year.
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“We never go into it asking for long-term, we kind of take everybody’s temperature when they come here and hope that it does. We understand if it doesn’t and the commitments, but I’ll say this, they really enjoyed being here Tuesday and I know that there is an aspect, Xavier started here and has wanted to come back for a long time,” Michaels said. “It’s amazing, the two young guys, and they’ve been doing this for a long time and have accomplished everything. They get to that point where they want to start to be able to give back and I think that’s where New Day is. I won’t lie, I am absolutely hoping to take advantage of that. They really had a great time and we are going to try and do everything we can to keep them here as long as we can. I asked them if we could broach those conversations and they were certainly open to it. I’m really hoping it’s certainly more than a one-time thing. It just becomes a question of how long. Those are always the questions and we understand that, those are the ones that they have to think about and talk with family members and those are things that have to get straightened out with NXT and main roster talents, but they appear to be open to the conversation, which we are very excited about,”
“There are a lot of main roster talent that have NXT roots and a lot of them like to come back and help out,” he later added. “We have a lot of them that live here in Orlando, that’s a big advantage to us as well. Usually, the process is something like, if we’re thinking about from a creative standpoint and we have it at X date, I do everything I can to get on the horn to Hunter [Triple H] and Bruce (Prichard), and see what the possibility is. Then, there are some, I don’t know whether it’s right or not, I take advantage of the cool titles and, ‘Hey, this is a quick one out of the blue, this is what we need. Can we get someone on the quick?’ That’s obviously more difficult and it’s not always…if we can get to somebody, but we’re not sure who. It is a number of different ways and we’ve done every one of them at one point or another.”
If Kingston and Woods win on Saturday, they’ll give The New Day its 12th tag team reign in WWE. They’ll also become the third team in history behind The Revival (FTR) and The Street Profits to have held the Raw, SmackDown and NXT tag titles at least once.
