Triple H Comments On NXT Creative Direction During His Absence

Triple H wasn’t a big fan of the creative direction in NXT following his health issues, last year.

From 2019 through the summer of 2021, fans and media alike had nearly unanimous praise for what is now-known as WWE NXT’s black and gold era. However, when Triple H had to take an extended leave of absence following heart issues, last September, everything seemingly went down hill. The keys were handed over to Shawn Michaels, however according to most reports, NXT’s transition to NXT 2.0, had Vince McMahon’s fingerprints all over it, something fans weren’t too happy about.

When speaking with BT Sport’s Ariel Helwani, Triple H expressed that while he felt some of the changes were necessary, he didn’t agree with the way some things went down following his absence:

“I didn’t necessarily agree with the creative direction sometimes. And that had nothing to do with Shawn [Michaels] or anything else when I stepped away for health reasons. And there was already pressure to change the direction and change what it was. And that happened, I knew what the changes were, I don’t know that I necessarily agreed with all of them, but I do think that there are a lot of changes that happened that were extremely positive for the brand and I would have liked to have done anyways that I think a lot of people would have gone, ‘No way he would have done that’.

The brand turned into something else, different from what the original intention was. Part of that was the success of it, part of that was [the] pandemic. The brand changed in the pandemic, people forget that for two years, maybe over, that we couldn’t recruit. I couldn’t train athletes, I had no place to train them. Then we moved, all of our training became a television studio to shoot Raw and SmackDown.

I had all these athletes under contract, anybody that already didn’t fully understand what they were doing and how to execute it wasn’t learning because there was no place for them to train, we medically weren’t even allowed to put them in the building to let them train. So if we wanted to, we had no place for them to train because the training facility was a television studio. That massively changed what it was, massively changed where it was headed, and what it would become.”

Of course, almost everything in WWE has changed seemingly overnight following the retirement of Vince McMahon, this past June, and while Shawn Michaels is still the lead man in charge in NXT, Triple H now oversees creative of the entire company.

Speaking of ‘The Game’, Triple H and the rest of the company are set to host their first major premium live event in the UK in three decades in the form of Clash At The Castle, which takes place on Saturday, September 3 at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. TJR’s official preview for Clash At The Castle can be found by clicking here.

(h/t to InsideTheRopes for the transcription)