Interesting Point About The State Of NJPW's Locker Room

[Bob-O]

Granted, this is what they get for not staggering their contracts throughout the year, but it's wild to me how overlooked this is while WWE's backstage is understood to be a tire fire right now because never-were's requesting releases seems to be the cool thing to do. Truth be told, and we'll never really know, AEW or no AEW, a lot of these guys were probably leaving anyway... Kenny said after AEW's recent Ice Cream Social that WWE was his second choice.

The gravity of the Elite leaving and the impact it's going to have on NJPW's plans to expand Stateside I think is being criminally overlooked.

[cero2k]

whoever wrote that topic doesn't understand NJPW, or what's happening for that matter.

ALL the people that he listed leaving NJPW, aside from KUSHIDA and Nakamura which he/she didn't mention, are americans, and for that matter, most were Jr heavyweight people, they were never going to be main eventing or even make it to posters. It's the same complain that a Japanese fan would have with Hideo Itami, or Asuka, or Nakamura, or KUSHDIA in WWE, it's stupid to believe that any of them are going to become the poster boys of WWE. NJPW is at the end of the day, a Japanese company that caters to their Japanese crowd, just like WWE caters to their American crowd.

Most of those mentioned leaving NJPW were living in the US and straight up traveling to all the NJPW shows, it's not the same than earning a lot of money and not have to do tours in japan on a monthly basis. Most of those guys, as americans, grew up idolizing wrestling for WWE and Wrestlemania, OF COURSE they're going to go to WWE if WWE makes a good enough offer. Gaijin leave Japan all the time, it's the nature of their status and allure.

Everyone that leaves NJPW usually has a pre-determined destination, no one really leaves just because. Look at WWE tho, Ambrose, Revival, etc all asked for releases because they want out of WWE, not because they have offers from other places. To me that is a big difference.

Furthermore, AEW is a promotion of friends, I can almost assure you that if AEW wasn't controlled or booked by Kenny's friends, he wouldn't have left NJPW for them. Would he had gone to WWE, maybe, Kenny said himself that he doesn't feel there is much more left to do in NJPW for him (same reason taht KUSHIDA, KENTA, and Nakamura pretty much gave when they joined). These guys are wrestlers that want new challenges and love wrestling, not just collect paychecks like a bunch of WWE wrestlers that really don't have anything left to do in WWE, yeah, i'm talking to you Orton!

The gravity of the Elite leaving and the impact it's going to have on NJPW's plans to expand Stateside I think is being criminally overlooked.

I don't think so, NJPW for some reason thinks that they need american 'stars' to have success in the US, while the truth is, US fans want to see Okada vs Tanahashi, not Juice Robinson vs Cody. You don't need american stars when you have international stars. Bucks and Kenny are indeed great assets, but none of them are exactly necessary, especially all of those that were doing weekly ROH shows anyway. They barely did any shows on the second half of 2018, Omega was the champion and he was barely there. NJPW without the Elite feels like....NJPW, and that's what fans like about NJPW.

[Big Red Machine]

I don't think the situations are analogous for the following key reasons:
1. Most of the guys leaving (especially to go to AEW) are American/Canadian wrestlers going wo work for a company much closer to home.
2. Most of the guys leaving are going to help their good friends with their (multi-million dollar) start-up company.
3. The NJPW guys leaving are all at the end of their contracts. In the case of WWE almost everyone who wants to leave/is leaving is the middle of a contract. The only one who isn't is Ambrose, who well over three months in advance of his contract expiring, informed them that he would not be returning, and cited the specific reason of poor Creative, which is something most fans have been complaining about for a while, and lines up with at least The Revival's reason for requesting their release, if not some of the others as well. In WWE, the narrative is supported by and confirming something fans already though. In NJPW, there are many other more logical explanations for most of these cases (KUSHIDA being the possible exception, and it's possible, based on the time period he grew up in and who his mentor in the business is, that WWE has always been a dream of his and he's going for that reason rather than because he's unhappy in NJPW).