10 Things You Learn Binge Watching Every WWE NXT TakeOver
8. NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn Was The Most Important Event In NXT History
During the latter days of his in-ring career, NXT felt as much a proving ground for Triple H as anything else.
After a slow and steady 2012-13 reboot to wash away the stain of the gameshow era for the brand, it quietly morphed into the one thing wary and weathered WWE fans could still rely on. A weekly product offering logical progression and great matches that all fed into increasingly electrifying TakeOvers with their amazing payoffs and incredible matches. On its best day - and there were suddenly lots of those - NXT was quite simply an exceptional wrestling product and something Raws and SmackDowns from the era could only really harness in microcosmic moments.
Funded and augmented by WWE money and production respectively, it grew hand-in-hand with 'The Game's obscenely expensive Performance Center that, for better and worse, has determined a far more securer future than the wretched one promised by a mid-2000s developmental malaise overseen by John Laurinaitis.
TakeOver: Brooklyn was a celebration of all of this.
Back in the big building (and trumping fan interest in SummerSlam in that building the very next night), the show was a celebration of all 'The Game' had built (with WWE backing), presenting a near-perfect mix of indie darlings and homegrown talents colliding in a rare case of wrestling serving every master.
Hunter also achieved something as a booker that he never did as a wrestler too - he crafted something earnestly and truthfully transcendent. Sasha Banks and Bayley might have had a little something to do with it too...