“NXT” is in such a weird spot with tag teams right now. Gallus are the champions, The D’Angelo Family are presumably the next champions, and everyone else has either recently broken up or isn’t really doing much work in the proper tag team division right now, like Schism or Chase U. Nathan Frazer and Dragon Lee are a thing, but they’re apparently now in an eight-person feud with Meta-Four after the comatose Noam Dar was miraculously revived by an imitation Heritage Cup which he now refuses to believe is anything other than the real thing (this is amazing, by the way, we love it, no notes, change nothing). So when Tony D’Angelo and Stacks Lorenzo need a warm-up before their title match on Sunday, they get the new guys — Lucien Price and Bronco Nima. Which is a weird spot for them, considering they won their debut match because one of their opponents backstabbed the other one, and now get their second match against the #1 contenders, who definitely are not losing a tag match right before GAB.

To complicate matters (and worsen them) the aforementioned backstabber, Scrypts, was on commentary for some reason and added precisely nothing, spending most of his time facilitating an argument between Vic Joseph and Booker T about whether they should be calling him Scrypts or Reggie (Scrypts is now his “street name,” apparently, meaning only people from the streets can use it, or something). The attack by Axiom was as welcome as it was inevitable, but it had almost no impact on the match, meaning that as expected, Price and Nima are now 1-1, or to be more accurate, 0.5-1.5. Not exactly the dominant force promised by all those weeks of video packages.

It should be noted that the match was fine, but these are the kinds of ideas that distracted us and made us care about it less, especially since we knew the outcome. Lorenzo is really fun to watch, though; his ring style has basically become “hurl myself at someone else with reckless abandon,” and we dig it. We also liked that weird slithering motion Price did at one point, when he was smiling and making his face look like one of the monsters from “Attack on Titan.” That has possibilities.