The friendship of Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn was featured prominently this week on WWE Smackdown Live as the Canadian best friends got to be in the opening promo segment as well as the main event tag team match. When Smackdown’s General Manager Daniel Bryan was in the ring getting support from his hometown crowd in Seattle, Zayn interrupted him to say that he used to look up to Bryan, but he doesn’t anymore because Bryan is a “housewife” now, while Owens called Daniel “Mr. Bella” as an insult.
That led to Bryan putting the duo in a tag team main event match against Shinsuke Nakamura and Randy Orton. That match ended when Zayn hit Orton with a low blow punch followed by a Helluva Kick. Owens and Zayn celebrated in an over the top way. Zayn was still celebrating on Twitter on Wednesday.
When you pin a 13-time World Champion, clean as a whistle, in the middle of the ring. pic.twitter.com/VGyYi9wCVD
— Sami Zayn (@SamiZayn) October 18, 2017
This week’s Smackdown did 2.32 million viewers according to Showbuzz Daily, which is down from 2.47 million viewers last week. Any time the number goes down it’s not a good sign obviously, but it is similar to what they did two weeks ago with the same reported 2.32 million viewers. The reason there was a bit of a boost was because it followed Hell in a Cell. In the summer months earlier this year the show was doing around 2.5 million viewers, so there is a bit of a drop due to other sports competition.
The sports competition this week was the first NBA game of the season on TNT as the Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Boston Celtics in a close game that had 5.59 million viewers and a MLB playoff game between the New York Yankees coming back to beat the Houston Astros right around the time Smackdown was starting. That drew about 4.74 million viewers.
Next week’s Smackdown has already advertised the return of Commissioner Shane McMahon after two weeks off following his Hell in a Cell loss to Kevin Owens and also AJ Styles vs. Sunil Singh. At least we know Sunil = ratings. Right? Sure.
