Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE NXT: Tommaso Ciampa became Your® NXT Champion, with an assist from Johnny Confused Allegiances. Also, Kairi Sane knows it, you know it … she can beat Shayna Baszler. If you didn’t hear her say it, don’t worry, she’s gonna say it again.
If you missed this episode, you can watch it here. If you’d like to read previous installments of the Best and Worst of NXT, click right here. Follow With Spandex on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter, where everything and everyone is terrible.
And now, the Best and Worst of WWE NXT for August 1, 2018.
Best: The Ciampa’s Here
Before we talk about anything this week, we need to talk about new NXT Champion Of The World Tommaso Ciampa holding up the title belt at eye level so he can walk around ringside and lord it over any grandmas who might be watching. This is your NXT Champion: a sore loser and an even more sore winner who has figured out how to fuel his rivals’ hatred into opportunity. The only reason this hate-filled upside-down Eraserhead is the champ is because of Johnny Gargano, and everybody knows it … especially Gargano, who actually jogs past Aleister Black mid-run-in to attack Ciampa (again) and scream some self-serving shit into the microphone.
This is one of the most brilliant dynamics I’ve seen in the NXT Championship division (for lack of better classification) in a long time. It’s a perfect triple threat. You’ve got a chaotic good former champion in Aleister Black, walking to the ring to confront the company’s top villain, only to realize that a flawed, fallen former hero has become an enabler. So to keep this crazy little guy from continually getting in his way with his perverse rage quest, Black has to put him down with a kick to the mouth. So Ciampa hates Gargano, Ciampa sees Black as an overrated means to an end, Gargano hates Ciampa to the point of letting it ruin his marriage and friendships and fan base, Black wants his championship back from this greedy monster, and must also make sure to not help create any new monsters in the process.
Really good stuff in the main event slot of this week’s show, even if I could’ve used an additional 25-35 minutes of NXT Champion Tommaso Ciampa walking around ringside, making sure everyone over the age of Just Born knows he’s the man.
Worst: A Raw Tag Team Match
raised fist guy cracking me up
Note: NXT worsts tend to be relative. If this happened on Raw I’d probably be like, “at least I didn’t make a deal with the devil to trade my very soul in exchange for not having to watch this anymore.”
So Heavy Machinery finally gets a two-on-two tag team match against Caucasian Keiji Mutoh and his tag team partner, Clone of Caucasian Keiji Mutoh, aka The Mighty. Real quick, I still can’t get over how The Mighty’s entrance theme sounds like a bad TV intro song. No music in WWE needs to be changed as swiftly as that. But yeah, Shane Thorne and New Girl‘s Nick Miller have been opportunistically attacking and capitalizing on Them Thicc Machines, so it makes total sense that (1) Heavy Machinery would finally get the win when the odds were even, and that (2) The Mighty would be figuratively hoist by their own petard when a different team shows up to manipulate them into a loss. They can dish it, but they can’t take it, as it were.
This was the low point of the show this week for me, however, mostly because of how by-the-numbers it is. When you’re me and your job is to watch every minute of every WWE show every week forever and write thousands of words about what you thought within like, 12-ish hours of broadcast, you start drowning in observable patters and trends. WWE really only has a core batch of like seven or eight stories they pull from, so when a team shows up in the crowd, you know it’s here to set up a distraction finish. They do it twice in this episode … once to fulfill the trope, and once to subvert it, with Velveteen Dream and EC3. I guess what I’m trying to say is I like the wrestling better when anyone paying attention isn’t three steps ahead of the wrestlers.
Speaking of that …
https://twitter.com/MrBrandonStroud/status/1024879875218276357
If you need the quickest and easiest example of STFU WHEN GROWN FOLKS IS TALKING, watch how unimportant Kona Reeves becomes the second Velveteen Dream shows up. It’s less like a distraction run-in and more like they went to the post-match and forgot to finish wrestling.
Gotta say though, I love that Nova Corp thing Reeves does when he says he’s “the finest,” though. It’s like he’s breaking through an atmosphere to fly through space. If you put some dirt mall Four Horsemen with this guy I’d be all about him. Just the worst.
Best: Shayna For Days
One of my favorite matches in the original Mae Young Classic was the (relative) sprint between Shayna Baszler and Candice LeRae, so not only was I happy to see them do it again here, I was happy to see them acknowledge and call back to that match. That one ended with Shayna reversing Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride into the Kirifuda Clutch — bring back the “In Wrestling” section of wrestlers’ Wikipedia pages, please — so the rematch features the same spot, only with LeRae being able to get to the ropes and the match continuing. That original match really “made” Baszler in my eyes, because I was 100% sure she was gonna take Johnny Gargano to church when it was over.
There’s something truly fantastic to me about how Shayna Baszler puts together a match. I love that she’s a heel bully, but she’s not a cheater. She’s just a bully because she is very good at fighting, and doesn’t seem like she’s put much time or effort into being good at anything else. She just fights for a living, so she fights all the time, even when she doesn’t have to. So her matches often feel like real “fights,” at least as much as WWE in-ring action can without a bunch of worked-shoot nonsense. I ADORE the fact that the finish here is Candice doing enough of a scouting report and remembering enough of their first encounter to counter out of a few bad situations, only to miss her big move (because Shayna always does her homework, because she fights for a living) and get EAT THE HELL UP by a knee to the face, straight into the choke. Shayna knows she has to finisher her off right now, or else, so she does. Love it.
I’m reading a lot of speculation that Kairi Sane’s going to take the NXT Women’s Championship from Baszler at TakeOver Brooklyn, but I don’t see it happening. I think the money’s in keeping the belt on Shayna until Evolution, so you can introduce her relationship to Ronda Rousey on the main roster, and give us a women’s championship match that’s different from whatever Carmella and Alexa Bliss are doing. Shayna is the opposite of them in style, approach, and vibe, and we all know that Four Horsewomen story is going to be foundational for the women’s division on the main show going forward. But hey, if Sane takes the belt in Brooklyn, at least give us the rematch at Evolution. Would be pretty dope to see a rematch of the first Mae Young Classic finals on the same show as the finals of the second.
Best: STATE LINE
Finally this week we have Mustache Mountain getting a strong win over jobber tag team State Line, who I keep calling “State Patrol” because I’m desperate for a Sgt. Buddy Lee Parker cameo on NXT television. State Line (who have that team name for some reason) are Matt Knox — the one who looks like an unlicensed AWA Hulk Hogan action figure — and Brandon Taylor, better known as California’s Robert Baines. You may also know him as The Hobo, or from his gig at the Afterbuzz NXT show. He rules and is very different from … well, everyone else at NXT, so I loved seeing him get the spot here. And there’s probably a reason they tagged him in to take all the offense, and left “awkward heeling and then disappearing” to Knox.
Mustache Mountain vs. Undisputed Era is going to tear the goddamn roof off in Brooklyn, and I can’t wait. Also, has Tyler Bate always sounded this much like Ali G when he talks?
Next Week:
