The Best And Worst Of WWE NXT 12/25/19: Bask In His Gloria

Previously on the Best and Worst of NXT: Adam Cole defended the NXT Championship against Finn Bálor with help from a returning Johnny Gargano, and Rhea Ripley took the NXT Women’s Championship from Shayna Baszler in one of the best TV matches of the year.

If you’d like to read previous installments of the Best and Worst of NXT, you can do that 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 December 25, 2019.

NXT Dark

This week’s show, hosted in-studio by Queen Cathy Kelley and two of the supporting hyenas from The Lion King, is a cobbled-together collection of Full Sail dark matches and some new stuff taped after Friday night’s Smackdown. That means some of the matches feel like they belong on weekly NXT TV, and others are being performed in front of a silent, progressively emptier crowd that gets cloaked in darkness and replaced with canned crowd sounds. There’s a real uncanny valley situations happening when you can hear fans loudly cheer and react to all the big moves and near falls while watch them sit on their hands and stare. Y’all are the ones that bought front row tickets to a Christmas edition of Smackdown. “Your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what makes you cheer!”

This week’s show being pre-taped also means there’s zero character or story advancement at play, and all the matches can be summed up with, “this was pretty good.” Even a taped episode of NXT is watchable, and doesn’t have the expired milk smell a lot of pre-taped holiday wrestling efforts have.

Best: Theory Of A Deadman

Up first is former EVOLVE Champion Austin Theory showing up to answer the North American Championship open challenge and having a very good, competitive match with Roderick Strong. I was going to do a bit about how bad I think the name “Austin Theory” is, but I guess he’s wrestling a dude named, “Roderick Strong,” so it could be worse. Winner moves on to face Dallas Muscles in round two.

Theory’s got a huge upside at only 22 and is obviously going to be a big star one of these days. He looks like someone tried to stuff Finn Bálor into Renee Dupree’s body and ended up splitting the difference. Plus, at 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds, he’s practically a giant in NXT. He’s more of an “I was raised watching Ring of Honor” kind of 22-year old prodigy, as opposed to, say, Velveteen Dreams’ “I was raised watching Nikolai Volkoff on Madison Square Garden fan-cams” kind. Lots of convoluted but cool looking offense, lots of apron moves, lots of kick-outs. He’s the platonic ideal of a 2017-ish pro wrestler, which still plays well as we’re heading into 2020. You can see Roderick leading him through everything and keeping the match together, but being in the ring on TV against a nearly 20-year veteran heel with limitless stamina is exactly the kind of opponent Theory needs and can grow by working.

This was pretty good!

205 Taped

Also pretty good is Isaiah ‘Swerve’ Scott vs. Jack Gallagher, which at almost 14 minutes felt like a Christmas miracle. It’s in front of the Smackdown crowd, though — check those white ropes, and that enormous building they’re suddenly in — so no matter how good it is, it’s not impressing anybody. It’s why they should’ve taped a show like 205 Live from Full Sail from the start. You can watch this entire 2:26 highlight video and not see a single fan move.

The positives here are obvious, though. It’s two guys who can kill it in the ring getting time to do so, spotlighting the “cruiserweight” style without just repeatedly diving to the floor over and over. Scott’s awesome, and would already be one of the best in-ring guys in the promotion if he wasn’t so into slapping his leg. He’s got that pre-NXT Johnny Gargano thing going where he’s gonna smack the shit out of his own thigh no matter what he does. Although if you read the comments on that YouTube clip, people are like, “I definitely heard a pop, I think Gallagher’s arm is broken!” So I guess it works, at least right now, but even those folks are gonna wise up if there’s a violently loud arm-breaking sound on 3-5 moves per match and people keep showing up the next week uninjured. It’s one of the reasons I’m not a big fan of the “finger breaking” thing Pete Dunne and Marty Scurll love so much. It’s a crowd pleaser, so I understand, it doesn’t hold up if you think about it for more than five seconds.

That’s an extremely minor nitpick, though, it was just on my mind. The larger nitpick is that I wish this had happened in front of the Full Sail crowd, so the guys in the ring could know somebody watching liked what they were doing. Brother, I’d rather be a hard-to-please kind of derided “mark” fan who knows when the good product’s good than a valued member of the WWE Universe who shuts up, mildly pops for entrances, and then sits around staring and what-chanting everything else. It feels depressing to say you like something, have no idea why you like it, visibly not care about it when it’s happening in front of you, continuing to tell people you like it and buying the same expensive seats to not care about watching it when it comes back to town.

On an unrelated note, anybody see the new Star Wars?

Another example of that is Dominiik Dijakovik vs. Bronson Reed. Jump to 2:30 for the finish. You’re watching a dynamic fat guy get chokeslammed off the second rope and not reacting at all? You can see like, two people in the entire audience even notice the finish has happened. Bummer. I’m glad this is the holiday exception and not the regular way the shows are taped, because man, if NXT became the thing they taped in front of bored crowds after they’ve sat through all the wrestlers they wanted to see and two hours of a piss-poor Smackdown it would be a total nightmare. Imagine that Rhea Ripley vs. Shayna Baszler NXT Women’s Championship match in front of a 205 Live crowd. Now think about the experience we’d have taken from us if it only existed as a cost-saving measure performed in front of the third of a WWE main roster audience that felt obligated to stay.

Anyway, Dijak vs. Reed is pretty good. The scenario itself is underwhelming, making the match a little underwhelming, and Dijakovic seems to have lost almost all of his shine and momentum since War Games. You only have so many Keiths Lee to wrestle, though, and I’m sure he’ll be able to recover and get something going again in the new year. Even if it’s just murdering Lio Rush for stealing his frenemy.

Come Sail Away

We’re back at Full Sail for the women’s division matches, which is a good idea for a variety of reasons you probably don’t need me to point out. At the very least, it allows the developmental talent to continue developing, and keeps NXT as a place for positive growth whether it’s being considered “developmental” anymore or not.

Par exemple, Candice LeRae gets a pretty good win over Taynara with a (pretty bad) bottom rope springboard thing to the floor and a much better quebrada. Much like the Theory/Strong match, I think Taynara will get where she’s going a lot faster if she gets more opportunities to have competitive, 8-minute matches with a world-traveled 17-year veteran.

Taynara’s issue is a thing a lot of modern WWE stars have (and don’t always shake) where they’re good when they’re doing moves, but are too visibly in their own heads between and taking them. Like, you can see Taynara going “oh, okay, gotta put my head between the ropes now” to take the rope-assisted neckbreaker at the start of the YouTube clip. She’s supposed to set it up with an attempted shoulderblock to the midsection, but Candice’s midsection is nowhere to be found. Taynara’s just like, “okay, time to take a moooove.” You can see it again at the 1:00 mark when she just openly takes Candice’s face in her hands to say TIME TO DO THE KICK ROLL-UP THING WE REHEARSED. It’s something she can break, I think, but some people never do. It’s the difference in someone like Sasha Banks, and someone like, I don’t know, Rosa Mendes. The difference between Shayna Baszler and almost everyone else. You have to get comfortable performing your character 100% of the time you’re in the ring, in every single moment, whether you’re in the middle of a big moment or just lying there doing nothing.

Clarification: Yes, I say this as a person who watches wrestling and doesn’t do it. It’s not a condemnation of anybody’s abilities, and I think Taynara’s a bad-ass. It’s just something I notice that I want her to be really good at, so I can keep pointing out what a bad-ass she is!

Similarly, Shotzi Blackheart gets her … official? Unofficial? debut against Bianca Belair. Shotzi’s got an excess of charisma and a great ability to connect with crowds — I’ve seen her at a ton of events in southern California and very few people have the instant connections he’s developed — and will (hopefully) get enough time and in-ring work in NXT to put it all together. There’s a lot of starting and stopping and making sure both parties are good to go here, but that’s to be expected. I like that Bianca Belair’s grown as a wrestler to where she’s now the reliable anchor of a match, helping a young star get their shit over.

For a great example of being your character 100% of the time you’re in the ring, pay attention to how Bianca pins Shotzi. She hits her finish and goes for a nonchalant cover, because she knows it’s over. While she’s doing that, she’s still selling her injuries from the match. She’s still selling when the pin’s over and uses Shotzi’s bent leg to pick herself up, then gets disgusted that she did it and pushes the leg out of the way. Every second in there is an opportunity to tell a story and develop your character, and Belair’s killing it.

Excited to see more of Shotzi going forward, and to see more of Bianca Belair dominating folks and maybe being a legitimate contender to Rhea Ripley’s NXT Women’s Championship. I would not mind seeing those two beat the shit out of each other. I always talk about how Io Shirai obviously needs to be the next champion, but the fact that I keep thinking it probably means she doesn’t need it. Bianca Belair 2020, y’all.

Best: Keith Lio

Or, “Gloria In Excelsis Keith Lee.”

Keith Lee continues his slow rise to mega-superstardom by winning matches and providing 1-3 amazing GIFs in each. Shout-out to whichever intern at Full Sail used my “Keith Lee is the GIF that keeps on giving” joke from a few weeks ago. It’s Keith and Lio Rush — instantly an essential tag team from their announcement, and probably this year’s Dusty Classic winners — against Damian Priest and [draws name out of hat] Tony Nese. I wonder who’s taking the pinfall here?

For your GIF quota, here’s Keith Lee in: The Rise of Kaiju Santa.

Hilarious. Also worth GIF’ing were Keith’s Christmas-themed disposal of Tony Nese and subsequent interception of Damian Priest’s dive, as well as the frog splash from Keith’s shoulders that ended the match. I want Keith to be the next big singles star as much as the next guy, but man, I also want to see him and Lio Rush own the NXT tag team division for a while. It’s just too good.

Next Week:

It’s a special NXT Year End Awards special on New Year’s Day, hosted once again by Queen Cathy and McDonaldland characters Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar. See you then!