SmackDown Live review (Dec. 19): 3 takeaways

Shinsuke Nakamura might be the one to watch

It’s easy to be caught up in one result. Very easy to overreact. Even easier to make a baseless assumption.

However …

Shinsuke Nakamura might now be the one to watch for.

Some have felt that Shinsuke’s run has been a bit underwhelming so far. His workrate has been a bit all over the place since arriving on the main roster. However, he’s amassed big wins over John Cena and Randy Orton. The crowds are still very much into him, his awesome theme song and the presence that he carries himself with. That trend continued Tuesday night. In what was a pretty good six-man tag main event, Nakamura grabbed the pin fall over the team of Jinder Mahal, Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn. Nak was on a team that featured WWE Champion AJ Styles and Randy Orton. Orton, the 2017 Rumble winner, could’ve gotten the pinfall. Styles, the champ, could’ve too.

But they didn’t. Nakamura did.

It sure seems like WWE’s beginning to position him as next in line for the WWE Championship. Rumors have been swirling  for quite a while now that Nakamura is going to win the Royal Rumble. Plenty of fans, all over, are anticipating a Nakamura-Styles collision. We got a taste of that in the Money in the Bank Ladder Match in June. The St. Louis crowd went bonkers for a staredown (I was there, and it was electric) between the two, and there’s no denying that it would be a hit if they faced off.

There’s plenty more that could come in the next few weeks. But Tuesday night may have started something. Some day, we might look back in a few months to Dec. 19 as the day that Shinsuke Nakamura’s road to the main event of WrestleMania 34 truly began. And if that’s indeed the case, they did a fine job of beginning to position him for that moment.