After a sub-par episode last week, NXT was back to being pretty awesome this week, with two great matches and a pair of showcase matches for Ember Moon and Shinsuke Nakamaure. New guy Steve Cutler got a brief chance to shine as well. CWC did its thang, as usual, and delivered two fantastic matches. WWE Network is killing Wednesday nights.
NXT started with a really great tag match between TM-61 and the team of Tony Nese and Ariya Daivari. Nese and Shane Thorn in particular were impressive in terms of mixing power and agility. The upcoming cruiserweight division on Raw is going to give the main event guys something to really compete with. Thorn and Miller picked up the win with their Thunder Valley double powerbomb thing. It's a slick finishing move.
The next match was where I realized how much I really like Ember Moon and should look up her earlier work in Ring of Honor. She seems like an all around good wrestler with a variety of offense; almost half high-flying anf half- power moves.. Moon took down Leah Von in a near-squash match here, but I'd like to see what she can do in a longer match.
Andrade "Cien" Almas took on Austen Aries again. This match was very good and I would have liked it to go on a little longer actually. Aries is one of the best bumpers this side of Dolph Ziggler and he bounced off of Almas's offense nicely. The match shifted in main event mode with the two exchanging blows while staggering. Aries won with a smoothly applied Last Chancery submission. Great match, and I think the crowd may have cooled off on hating Almas.
Steve Cutler got a shot at the NXT champ Shinsuke Nakamura for some reason. Maybe now he can afford to wash that vest. Shinsuke toyed with him for a bit then Cutler got to have the upper hand for a minute. The King of Strong Style turned it around and finished him off with a crunchy inverted exploder suplex and a knee to the dome. Samoa Joe (on commentary) got to watch the champ raise his former title belt at the end. Joe and Nakamura has such an intense main event and I don't know how they'll top it short of turning things into a bloodbath.
Meanwhile, the Cruiserweight Classic chugged along with quarterfinals action between odds-favorite Zack Sabre Jr. and his longtime rival and training partner Noam Dar. This was a well-paced wrestling match between two technically sound and very patient competitors. There is a stigma against the cruiserweight style among some of the "old school" and it centers around an imagined lack of psychology in matches like this. ZSJ and Dar proved them wrong with this encounter, building to a crescendo by having both men pick a limb and work on it in ways that were effective looking and made sense. Daniel Bryan even called it a "chess match" on commentary, and he wasn't wrong. The technical stuff built to some great near-falls and then some desperate submission attempts by ZSJ. When they rolled out of the ring together in a leglock, I marked out. ZSJ finished off Dar with a brutal Rings of Saturn submission and advanced to the semis to face Gran Metalik.
Rich Swann took on T.J. Perkins in the second match of the show. This was more of a trapeze act than the first match, but they settled into a nice story about Swann's leg giving out over the course of the match. It kept him from scoring several potential pinfalls and it made Perkins' win a bit bittersweet. While the display of respect at the end bordered on touching, it didn't have the personal feel of the ZSJ/Dar match. Perkins goes on to face Kota Ibushi next week.
I'm think Ibushi vs. ZSJ in the finals, but as the news of WWE's cruiserweight signings revealed, we haven't seen the last of the others either. Neville seems like the obvious pick for an inaugural Cruiserweight champ, but will the title be awarded to the winner of this first tournament? Whatever they do, I can't wait to see the cruiserweights on Raw and NXT moving forward.
As always, thanks for reading and follow me on Twitter (@ChrisBComics) for more heedless commentary on geeky things.
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