Triple H was an internet darling a couple years ago when he was considered by many wrestling fans to be the best booker of 2024. Fast forward to 2026, and fan sentiment has changed quite a bit on how WWE creative is doing under his leadership. Nothing epitomizes this more than Pat McAfee being the shitty focal point of the WWE championship match at WrestleMania 42 night one, an event that featured too many short matches and too many ads.
During an interview this week on The Ariel Helwani Show, Killer
Kross (fka Karrion Kross in WWE) says he has a good sense for what patterns to look for when Triple H is calling all the shots, and that’s not what he sees in the WWE product right now.
“If I had to guess, I would say that there are people who call things in and he has to make the best of what they want to play out on television and the PLEs. That’s just my guess, and I base that on pattern recognition. That’s a thing that has become very prevalent, especially with Gen Z. When it comes to entertainment, if you’re creating something episodic with continuity, when continuity fails, there’s a red light that goes off. People go, what happened here? Especially with wrestling.
Back in the day, you here about guys on ‘punishment booking.’ Suddenly his push is killed, and then you hear months later he got in trouble outside of wrestling, so they didn’t feel like they could depend on him. Or he hurt somebody, he dropped somebody on the head or something.
Now that there’s new players involved, when there’s a failure of continuity and people don’t like it, it removes people from the suspension of disbelief, that entertainment. You know what I mean? I don’t think that’s him. He has his own patterns that I think were aligned with what the audience mostly wanted to see, and that’s speaking as a person who used to work for him. And I knew when he could call all of his shots, and I had an idea of when he couldn’t. And to me, this looks like a situation where he can’t call all of his shots. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully at all.”
Do you think this is an ongoing problem that reaches well beyond McAfee’s insertion into the WrestleMania main event? Does Triple H deserve the lion’s share of the blame for WWE’s creative lull, or is it the super rich TKO execs who are screwing things up the most? Is there a wild but plausible scenario over the next few years where Triple H is no longer head of WWE creative, perhaps as a result of a backstage power struggle? Let me know your thoughts on this topic in the comments below, Cagesiders.
