10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About 2023
2. How Uninteresting Much Of It Was
One more quick note on the Creeds: their main roster debut was incredible in and of itself, but it worked also as a result of WWE's discipline elsewhere.
After learning the lesson of his rehiring spree - in which multiple wrestlers, few of them interesting, were brought back in late 2022 to diminishing returns - Triple H instead set about working with what he had, mostly.
The Creeds, Dragon Lee, Zoey Stark, Cameron Grimes, Grayson Waller and JD McDonagh were promoted from NXT, and Bad Bunny, Logan Paul and Brock Lesnar worked part-time (as did the Undisputed WWE Universal champion), but each debut was spaced out. An impact was made at least half the time.
The effect of this disciplined approach was felt on multiple episodes of WWE Raw, since it seemed like members of the Judgment Day wrestled combinations of Cody Rhodes, Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn every single week. That wasn't even a feeling, or hyperbole: it was literally true for months and months on end.
WWE was coherent, popular, and on top in 2023 - but it was never the most exciting promotion, and rarely did it generate much discussion. They didn't do much in the way of radical booking. The in-ring style was still a bit homogenised.
Triple H does not do water cooler television, and this, more than any single catastrophic error, could prove to be the undoing of this era of resurgence over time.