So after some brief speculation, we are going to see a reunion of “Team Hell No” consisting of Daniel Bryan and Kane taking on the Bludgeon Brothers (Luke Harper and Erick Rowan) at Extreme Rules for the Smackdown Tag Team Championships. In a sense, this is a rekindling of a previous rivalry some years ago when Bryan and Kane were taking on the Wyatt Family, which also consisted of Harper and Rowan at the time.
My sense is that this is just another chapter in this continuing honeymoon for Daniel Bryan’s comeback tour. What better way to do so than by reuniting him with a long time tag team partner with whom he actually won the titles with and was a key moment in leading up to Bryan becoming over with the WWE Universe? I say this is a chapter because I don’t think Kane and Bryan are beating the Bludgeons at Extreme Rules. The only reason I say this is because Kane’s real-life persona (Glenn Jacobs) is currently running for mayor of Knox County, Tennessee and is most likely to win in the August election.
I’m not saying that it’s out of the ordinary to hold another job while serving in public office at the local level; that happens all the time. However, not all people are wrestling on a full-time schedule as a championship title holder and running a city. So I don’t think Team Hell No is walking away with the titles.
Now, if WWE wanted to swerve the fans or try something different, here are some suggestions of who they could have partnered Daniel Bryan with as a tag team partner:
Tye Dillinger
The “Perfect 10” has lately been languishing in backstage segments of Smackdown Live with not a lot of matches on screen. His last few segments involved this useless and bizarre interaction with an absent R-Truth, who was sent over to SD Live during the Superstar Shakeup but kept “going to the wrong arena”.
Dillinger is another unfortunate example of how an NXT call-up has been lost in the shuffle of the main roster. He was booked in a tough feud against former NXT champion Bobby Roode before getting into a program with Sanity, eventually beating Eric Young in a steel cage to end his tenure on the black and yellow brand. But since then, besides coming out at Number 10 during Royal Rumble matches, Dillinger hasn’t been utilized much on the Smackdown roster.
Putting someone with that much potential with another underdog like Bryan would be a compelling tag team for the Smackdown division.
Xavier Woods
You might be asking why I would select a member of the New Day as Bryan’s potential tag team partners. Woods is already a multi-time tag team champion alongside Big E and Kofi Kingston (although utilizing this ‘Freebird’ rule for a three-man team to hold the titles). If you haven’t noticed lately, Woods has been rather stellar in either singles matches or tag teaming with his New Day partners. He’s got a series of moves that are rather high risk and entertaining (such as jumping off the top rope all the way across the ring onto a prone opponent).
I think the New Day have a good chemistry and provides the fun, entertaining aspect for a WWE show, but even though they are now the longest reigning tag team champions in the company I don’t see them going after the titles again any time soon. Maybe it’s time for Xavier Woods to break out of his mould slightly and team up with someone else apart from the New Day.
The Miz
Here’s a curveball for you: what are the odds that Daniel Bryan would be teaming with the man that he’s had a bitter rivalry with dating back to 2010 before NXT was really a big deal. Miz was Daniel Bryan’s “pro” on the original NXT when many people thought it should have been the other way around. That sowed the seeds of animosity between the two and eventually led to Bryan winning the U.S Title from Miz.
The big moment between these two was in 2016 when Daniel Bryan was Smackdown General Manager and during a segment of Talking Smack, he castigated Miz for wrestling a ‘soft style’ and being afraid to take risk, in which the Miz let loose with an amazing shoot over how he has been disrespected and looked down upon since he entered WWE, which did have some element of truth depending on how you perceive the Miz.
When the Superstar Shakeup this year sent the A-Lister back to Smackdown after a year on RAW, everyone expected a revival of the feud with Daniel Bryan, who also recently returned to competing in the ring. Indeed, it was given that Bryan had put out the request to draft Miz to the blue brand prior to his relinquishing his General Manager duties when he started wrestling again.
They’ve been teasing some confrontation between the two for a few weeks now, and it’s a natural feud that works itself because of all the history between the two men. But WWE could have tried a very intriguing swerve by teaming these two together to compete for the tag titles. Bryan clearly does not think the Miz is a credible wrestler, and both men clearly have egos to match. And you thought Team Hell No was combustible when they first formed.
Samoa Joe
It’s not so much as Joe is traditionally seen as a heel, but he’s such a one-man wrecking crew and his on-screen attitude is mostly about beating other people up it’s hard to see him teaming with anyone on a permanent basis. But I included him here because as of this writing Smackdown doesn’t seem to have anything for him.
The video above teasing a match with Tye Dillinger notwithstanding, what is there for Joe right now? At least he got some on-screen time; Cesaro and Sheamus (The Bar, who are four-time RAW tag team champions) have been kept off screen on Smackdown Live for a few weeks now.
Also, both Joe and Daniel are submission experts, and I would like to see a team with that as their central focus of their offence.
So while Daniel Bryan and Kane’s reunion as Team Hell No is good for a few weeks of nostalgic pops leading up to Extreme Rules, it would have been better for WWE to develop something in the long term with a different tag team partner for Bryan.
An average professional doing the 9-5 grind who really loves wrestling across all platforms. Here's hoping wrestlers finally get some basic workers rights in 2021.
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