White’s excursion seemed to be an odd cocktail of genuine excitement from ROH and forced protection from behalf of New Japan. He was booked much stronger than a young talent tends to in the company, but could never claim momentum being in feuds that yielded no payoffs. It’s a strange creative tactic to book someone strong for its own sake, and that's, regrettably, what we saw.Big Red Machine wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2017 9:23 am They definitely gave him the time to shine, but they didn't really use him in a way that made his time feel particularly worthwhile to me as a fan. He elevated the match quality in the mid-card, but that was about it. They didn't try to make anything of him the way Gabe would do with someone when he got them on loan from Dragon Gate or NOAH for 6-8 months.
A possible direction the company could have gone in was to push White very hard as the next breakout star, advertising ROH as his ground floor to success. Sure, eventually he goes back to New Japan, but his return matches in ROH would be received as big babyface homecomings. The company should generally treat excursion talent more generously, though White in particular should have gotten labored work put into him, as the whole wrestling community is waiting for his star to ascend. Instead, he had mostly three star matches for a year in a half-baked, mostly non-committal, undercard workrate faction.