Fresh off WWE firing a number of Performance Center employees and key players in running WWE’s developmental system and NXT last week, the company has reportedly made a major change in how NXT’s creative team operates. Prior to now, the creative team was able to act autonomously under the regime of Paul Levesque (aka Triple H) unlike Monday Night Raw and Friday Night SmackDown. But according to PWInsider‘s Mike Johnson, the team now directly reports Bruce Prichard (the executive director for both Raw and SmackDown) and Christine Lubrano, WWE’s senior vice president of creative writing operations.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Johnson also noted that Johnny Russo (no relation to Vince Russo) will be the head of the NXT writing team going forward “under Prichard and Lubrano’s supervision.” He’s been NXT’s lead writer since July 2020.
NXT underwent its NXT 2.0 reboot back in September 2021, putting a heavier emphasis on homegrown talent trained at the WWE Performance Center. This has seen the rise of Bron Breakker (who won the NXT Championship last week), Carmelo Hayes (who just unified the NXT North American and Cruiserweight Championships), Grayson Waller, Von Wagner, Toxic Attraction and Cora Jade. Around the same time as the reboot, Levesque suffered a cardiac event and reportedly still hasn’t returned to his day-to-day operations. He spoke about NXT’s changes weeks prior following a WWE Tryout in Las Vegas.
“It’s a funny thing, people talk about shifting. It never really shifted,” he said. “So if you go back and look at the hiring process, (it’s) not the hiring process of a television show, it’s a hiring process of who we’re looking to train and make WWE Superstars. Long term. If you go back and look at it, it hasn’t shifted. It’s been the same process. I don’t negate anybody from a standpoint of, ‘I wrestled some independent stuff,’ ‘Well all right, you’re out!’ That’s not a factor to me, but it’s also not the factor that makes me go, ‘Okay, you’re in.’ When they get in here today, if somebody goes in and hits the ropes perfectly every time, has every roll perfect, does all the stuff, makes it look easy because they’ve been training, that’s not really showing me anything. You should be able to, if you’ve been training, if you’ve been working indies you should be able to do all of that.
“To me, what is the potential long-term? What is that potential? And are they willing to do the work to live up to that potential. Vince used to always say, ‘We’re a variety show’ — we are. In some manner, you need a little bit of everything,” he continued. “That’s the key to all of this. But people hear one statement and then make one (assumption). ‘Now it’s that. No, now it’s this.’ It always has been.”
Most Viewed
-
Image courtesy of NetEase
