Things are going quite well for Smackdown Live ever since the Wrestlemania season. Daniel Bryan coming back to in-ring competition gave a major boost to the show.
The Superstar Shakeup added some marquee names like Jeff Hardy, Samoa Joe, Cien Almas and more to the roster to make it compact. Plus, Paige is serving as the attractive general manager of the show to give icing on the cake.
AJ Styles is the WWE Champion on the Smackdown Live brand for the past 250+ days. He’s been a dominant champion and might not lose the title any time soon. Even the advertisements of September’s Hell in a Cell is portraying him as the title-holder. Samoa Joe will be the likely challenger against him if the championship still exists around his waist.
We have seen a decent championship feud on Smackdown between AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura ever since the biggest event of the year. General belief around this rivalry was that it would continue until the Summerslam PPV event. Nakamura would have won the title from Styles at the bygone Money in the Bank PPV event.
It was about to renew the feud over the next several weeks. But, AJ Styles came out victorious at the Last Man Standing match to retain his title. Apparently, this was a sudden change of planning by the WWE Creative team. The Wrestling Standard provided an update on the change of angle from Smackdown.
AJ and Nakamura were about to continue the WWE Championship feud. Jeff Hardy would have started a new program against Andrade Cien Almas over the United States Championship. Almas featured in a short rivalry against Sin Cara. He was about to challenge Hardy after getting done with his former friend.
But now, Almas was kept off from TV due to the storyline change. Nakamura replaced him in the United States title picture. He started to grow bad blood against Hardy after hitting a low blow on Smackdown. Later, he defeated Hardy to become the new US champion at Extreme Rules. Here are the updates from change-in-plan, from the source,
“After a short feud with Sin Cara, Almas would have moved on to a program with current US Champion Jeff Hardy, where he was likely going to pick up the title. One source stated that Vince McMahon “loves a foreign heel as US Champion”, additionally saying, “it was going to be Cien but it’ll [now] probably be Nakamura”.
