Nic Nemeth said he tried to turn Shinsuke Nakamura’s Backlash 2017 debut into a short, hard-hit MMA-style finish, but WWE chose a more traditional match instead. The result was a 16-minute bout in Chicago that ended with Nakamura’s Kinshasa and, years later, still looks like one of the clearest examples of how WWE handled him on the main roster.
The timing matters because Nakamura has just resurfaced on WWE SmackDown after another hiatus and again hinted that he has found a tag team partner to help him go after the MFTs. That is the same Nakamura who arrived to WWE NXT in 2016 to loud ovations, won the 2018 Men's Royal Rumble, and still spent long stretches of his main-roster run drifting in and out of view.
Nemeth’s memory of that night was blunt. He said he wanted to go “strong style” and imagined a quick, MMA-like sequence that would end with a knockout-style finish, something he thought would make the match pop. He also said the idea got a reaction backstage, but Vince McMahon wanted a more old-school WWE match, about 20 minutes long, with the time split between the two men. That is how Nakamura and Nemeth ended up wrestling for 16 minutes at Backlash 2017 instead.
The finish did not erase the point Nemeth was making. He has said Nakamura was a killer and deserved to be treated like a bigger deal much earlier, especially given the entrance reaction he saw and the way fans were already invested in him. Nakamura did win the match, but the conversation around it has lingered because the booking choice pulled the bout back toward familiar structure instead of letting it become something harsher and more memorable.
That old debate lands differently now because Nakamura is again being presented as someone with unfinished business. He has won the WWE United States Championship three times and the Intercontinental Title two times, and he teamed with Cesaro to win the SmackDown Tag Team Champions in 2020, but his runs have rarely felt as steady as the early buzz suggested they might. His return last week came with a fresh tease, not a full answer, and WWE has not revealed who the tag partner is supposed to be.
For now, that is the point. The Backlash 2017 story says WWE once had a chance to make Nakamura’s arrival feel more dangerous and chose not to, and the current SmackDown angle suggests the company is trying again to give him a sharper place on the show. Whether the unnamed partner is the one who finally changes that is the next piece the audience is waiting to see.
