WWE is Wasting Shinsuke Nakamura

The main roster run for Shinsuke Nakamura thus far has been vastly underwhelming and disappointing, and WWE’s bookers are to blame.

Shinsuke Nakamura has somehow gone from being the most exciting wrestlers on the SmackDown roster to…just another guy. When he debuted on SmackDown on the night after WrestleMania 33, Nakamura received one of the loudest reactions in recent memory. Many fans knew of Nakamura’s popularity in both NXT and in NJPW, and showed that with said loud pop.

But WWE has managed to mess things up with Nakamura’s main roster push since that date. Despite being such a well-received star upon his debut, Nakamura’s time on SmackDown since April has been lukewarm at best. The blame for this lies squarely on the shoulders of the main roster bookers, who have completely managed to slow down Nakamura’s rise and appear to have actually been working against him.

When he first debuted, WWE delayed Nakamura from actually wrestling on television, focusing instead on his entrance and mannerisms. The goal here was to show off his unique look, magnetism and charisma, much like how he reinvented himself when in NJPW. That didn’t work; even though WWE tried to build up Nakamura almost like a Brock Lesnar-like figure (i.e. one that wrestles on rarer occasions, making his actual in-ring appearances feel special), fans got bored with this very quick.

Now, Nakamura’s entrances have been exciting and memorable, to be sure. But in pro wrestling, one’s entrance barely counts for a quarter of what makes people gravitate towards them. A wrestler needs to actually wrestle in a ring for fans to stay interested in them. The SmackDown bookers didn’t seem to understand this philosophy, insisting to delay his main roster in-ring debut until Backlash, almost two months after he first appeared on that brand.

By the time that happened, Nakamura had lost some momentum, especially after WWE started referring to him more and more as ‘the artist’. WWE has this strange obsession with nicknames and monikers, which they attach to every single performer.

This has already been seen several times with many stars (Roman Reigns is ‘the Big Dog’, Seth Rollins is ‘the Kingslayer’, Kevin Owens is ‘the Prizefighter’, etc.), presumably as a desperate attempt to get fans to tweet things on Twitter. In Nakamura’s case, being called ‘the Artist known as Shinsuke Nakamura’ didn’t do anything to build up his matches or make people more interested in seeing him wrestle.

By the time he actually wrestled his first match, Nakamura was on even thinner ice. Nakamura wrestled his first main roster match at Backlash against Dolph Ziggler. WWE spent weeks hyping Nakamura as a major star whose sparse wrestling schedule thus far was meant to promote the idea that his matches were so rare because he was so good at wrestling.

Nakamura wrestled Ziggler in the opening match of the PPV. There’s the first counterintuitive direction on WWE’s part when it came to Nakamura’s actual wrestling. They spent so much time hyping up his in-ring debut, and he took on the role of a curtain jerker. That was a major sign that WWE had no idea what they were doing.

Then there was the match itself. It was supposed to be Nakamura’s debut match. Now, common sense suggests that when someone makes their first impression on a crowd that’s unfamiliar with them, they need to look as strong as possible. Because these first impressions do matter, which meant that pressure was on for both Nakamura and the bookers to put on a solid performance, despite being so low on the card.

That match was completely illogical. Ziggler was on offense more often than not and kicked out of Nakamura’s big moves easily. Even as the match progressed, Ziggler showed plenty of stamina, as if Nakamura’s strikes – which are meant to be his biggest assets owing to his training in Japan – had little-to-no effect on him.

While Nakamura did get the win in the end, the match itself was deflating. Nakamura looked like he could’ve lost at any moment, which damaged his momentum in the eyes of fans watching the show. He was already less popular than he had been when he debuted on SmackDown.

In more recent weeks, Nakamura developed a rivalry against Baron Corbin. Now, Corbin is someone whom WWE clearly want in a top position in the company. The decision, it seems, was to pair Corbin with Nakamura, who is an internationally-recognized star, in the hopes that Nakamura’s abilities would further elevate Corbin as a performer himself.

Unfortunately, those plans backfired with a lackluster rivalry overall which led to what was quite possibly the worst wrestling match in Nakamura’s career. The Nakamura-Corbin match at Battleground 2017 was abysmal, with some unnecessary stalling, multiple bear-hugs and one of the dumbest match finishes of the entire year.

This match killed the crowd in a major way, with their enthusiasm for this match disappearing once the ending took place. Worse, the crowd never really got much better for the rest of Battleground. In other words, the Nakamura-Corbin match was so bad that it set the tone for the rest of the PPV in a bad way.