The 12 WWE Wrestlers Who Debuted In 2017 - Ranked

2. Shinsuke Nakamura

Shinsuke Nakamura Kevin Owens
WWE.com

WWE Debut: SmackDown, April 4

It’s funny to call Shinsuke Nakamura’s WWE debut year a bit of a disappointment and then rank it this high. But if you watched Nakamura in NXT, you saw a magnetic personality who commanded attention and felt truly special nearly every time he was on TV.

Nakamura’s charisma has carried him well through the first year on the main roster, and he’s been treated like a top-level guy since day one, but you can’t help but feel like he’s lost some of his luster.

In his first year on the main roster, we saw Shinsuke lose multiple WWE Championship matches to Jinder Mahal and become the first superstar eliminated from the Raw versus SmackDown match at Survivor Series. At the same time, he also defeated John Cena clean.

Additionally, we haven’t really gotten to see Nakamura cut loose in the ring since coming up to SmackDown, certainly nothing like his first match in NXT against Sami Zayn. There’s still plenty of upside for Shinsuke, and he hasn’t been grossly mishandled, so it will be interesting to see what happens next year.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.