When’d “We Want All the Toys Even the 1s We Don’t Use” Stop?

[KAMALARAMBO: BOOMSHAKALAKA!!!]

It seems like this was pretty much the WWE mindset from 2001 to fairly recently. With the slew of releases and WWE more or less passing on buying ROH though, I think it’s fair to say this is no longer the mindset.

It seems like it’s gradually been happening for years now, but unfortunate remnants of it still remain.

[Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!!]

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one night appearance, you've fired too many people.

[eJm]

Mar 19, 2022 10:55:56 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one-night appearance, you've fired too many people.

Pretty much all of that, yeah. And it wasn't like they weren't warned about bloat, the last presidents were fired over that.

[polarbearpete]

Mar 19, 2022 10:55:56 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one night appearance, you've fired too many people.

That’s pretty much it. It coincided with Khan’s hiring.

[The Summer of Muskrat XVII]

Mar 19, 2022 10:55:56 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one night appearance, you've fired too many people.

Nick Khan didn’t fire anyone, probably didn’t even look at names of who they should cut. Vince fired people. Nick Khan is a numbers guy, I see it being much more likely he said “We should trim our payroll by $X” then him going through the actual roster and making picks himself.

[eJm]

Mar 19, 2022 11:58:30 GMT -5 The Summer of Muskrat XVII said:

Mar 19, 2022 10:55:56 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one night appearance, you've fired too many people.

Nick Khan didn’t fire anyone, probably didn’t even look at names of who they should cut. Vince fired people. Nick Khan is a numbers guy, I see it being much more likely he said “We should trim our payroll by $X” then him going through the actual roster and making picks himself.

I would say that it is somewhat likely that Khan and his team assembled a list of people who could get cut because of their TV usage and using the payroll reason to justify it because he's a numbers guy in that degree (Probably measuring someone like Santana Garrett and going "She had one Rumble match and hasn't been seen since, why is she still here?" etc) but yeah, Vince probably looks at it, approves it and carries on booking stuff none the wiser until he's calling up Mickie James to see if Impact would let her go on a field trip to St. Louis.

[Mozenrath]

Mar 19, 2022 11:58:30 GMT -5 The Summer of Muskrat XVII said:

Mar 19, 2022 10:55:56 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one night appearance, you've fired too many people.

Nick Khan didn’t fire anyone, probably didn’t even look at names of who they should cut. Vince fired people. Nick Khan is a numbers guy, I see it being much more likely he said “We should trim our payroll by $X” then him going through the actual roster and making picks himself.

That does sort of sum it up. We know Vince doesn't actively participate in a lot of hirings and firings, but also, it isn't like he's ignorant of what Khan does since he hired him to be a hatchet man. It's similar to when decisions get blamed on Pritchard and Johnny Ace: they do what Vince hired them to do because Vince knows both men well and decided he's down for it.

[eJm]

Mar 19, 2022 12:16:18 GMT -5 Mozenrath said:

Mar 19, 2022 11:58:30 GMT -5 The Summer of Muskrat XVII said:

Nick Khan didn’t fire anyone, probably didn’t even look at names of who they should cut. Vince fired people. Nick Khan is a numbers guy, I see it being much more likely he said “We should trim our payroll by $X” then him going through the actual roster and making picks himself.

That does sort of sum it up. We know Vince doesn't actively participate in a lot of hirings and firings, but also, it isn't like he's ignorant of what Khan does since he hired him to be a hatchet man. It's similar to when decisions get blamed on Pritchard and Johnny Ace: they do what Vince hired them to do because Vince knows both men well and decided he's down for it.

And if people go to him, he can claim ignorance and be like "Oh, it was Pritchard and Ace, if it was my choice, I would have kept you" when, as the CEO and Chairman of the company, it was his choice to not do that.

[This Player Hating Mothman]

Nick Khan is absolutely the huge reason you can't possibly overlook, but I think the way the 'War' has gone is another big one. WWE really ramped up its aggressive signing behavior in the '10s as the indies were picking up steam, and the hiring sprees were a clear sign they wanted to smother the whole situation if they could. Then came the NXT franchisings, and I think there were two major problems that cropped up there. When AEW showed up, things ramped up and WWE was in a firing freeze and a massive overspendy resign spree. Then, two things happened.
-They couldn't spend the competition away. AEW has not burned out under incompetence, poor ratings, and hubris. AEW hasn't become an active hardcore megathreat to WWE in major terms, but it's succeeded and it's become something that isn't going to crumble just because WWE holds one guy ransom. A bunch of cast-offs have done well in the transition to AEW, but if you cut every release out of the AEW roster, that's still a banger company. Take the roster that the company entered into 2020 with and only consider any new additions if they came from the indies? That's a show still succeeding in pretty big ways. There's no way WWE could have spent AEW into failure, so why keep trying?
-Triple H lost the war. So much of their hiring and their holding was guys with name value from the independents, and when he lost the war, it was a rebuttal of the vision he was selling Vince on and the talents that came with it. Remember that two financial execs outright "left the company" in January of 2020 because they thought holding on to all these people was a bad idea. Barrios and Wilson were said to have been very respected for the successes they brought and were sort of opposite Trips and Steph as potential visions for the company. At a time when Vince had faith in Triple H, that wasn't enough. Shortly thereafter, with Nick Khan in a big position and making even bigger moves opposite NXT failing to smother AEW in the crib, suddenly that meant nothing. In came a "new" inner circle for Vince and company politics, and the right people had Vince's ear for him to start shedding names. The priorities became streamlining cheaper talent who they could train in-house because that aligns with the priorities of the people who have the most clout right now.

[Mozenrath]

Mar 19, 2022 12:17:53 GMT -5 eJm said:

Mar 19, 2022 12:16:18 GMT -5 Mozenrath said:

That does sort of sum it up. We know Vince doesn't actively participate in a lot of hirings and firings, but also, it isn't like he's ignorant of what Khan does since he hired him to be a hatchet man. It's similar to when decisions get blamed on Pritchard and Johnny Ace: they do what Vince hired them to do because Vince knows both men well and decided he's down for it.

And if people go to him, he can claim ignorance and be like "Oh, it was Pritchard and Ace, if it was my choice, I would have kept you" when, as the CEO and Chairman of the company, it was his choice to not do that.

Basically. You get the occasional thing like Jimmy Wang Yang getting rehired where it did seem like Vince's will had been misinterpreted and he had wanted to keep Wang, but that's certainly a rarity.

[A Platypus Rave]

Mar 19, 2022 12:03:01 GMT -5 eJm said:

Mar 19, 2022 11:58:30 GMT -5 The Summer of Muskrat XVII said:

Nick Khan didn’t fire anyone, probably didn’t even look at names of who they should cut. Vince fired people. Nick Khan is a numbers guy, I see it being much more likely he said “We should trim our payroll by $X” then him going through the actual roster and making picks himself.

I would say that it is somewhat likely that Khan and his team assembled a list of people who could get cut because of their TV usage and using the payroll reason to justify it because he's a numbers guy in that degree (Probably measuring someone like Santana Garrett and going "She had one Rumble match and hasn't been seen since, why is she still here?" etc) but yeah, Vince probably looks at it, approves it and carries on booking stuff none the wiser until he's calling up Mickie James to see if Impact would let her go on a field trip to St. Louis.

Yeah, I'm sure Nick Khan had a spreadsheet of things like how much each person was costing them, how much screen time they have, and then maybe added notes of people that could fill the same role only cheaper (from an outsider by the numbers value obviously... but like we're paying Braun 1 million dollars, when we have Omos who we aren't using who is just as big and for way cheaper)

Vince 100% signed off on any of the cuts brought to him though and is the top dog of the company so nothing gets done there without his ok.

[This Player Hating Mothman]

Who gets fired is absolutely a Vince decision, but I think it's massively reductive to say "Nick Khan didn't fire people, Vince McMahon fired people". Even in a company where the owner is as hands-on as Vince is in WWE, there is a complicated balance of different people in power and decisions that get made. Even if Nick Khan isn't personally signing death warrants, when he says "We should cut talent in the middle of this pandemic" or "We should lay off the entire live touring department instead of just furloughing them, or even keeping them on the payroll because we're richer than god", Nick Khan is absolutely party to these decisions. Yeah, Vince tried to mindgame AJ on how Heyman was the one who fired Gallows and Anderson, and Vince absolutely signed off on it, but Heyman still politicked away guys he wanted out of the company. They both take a share of that. Anyone who had a conversation aobut how Braun is all this money and they can get a different tall guy for cheaper is involved in the decision to cut Braun.

Like yeah, at the base level, "Nick Khan fired those people" is reductive, and "Vince is in charge, he made the call" is correct, but still itself a reductive read, because then if you zoom out further, yeah. Nick Khan fired those people. The people who tabled this stuff aren't absolved because someone above them wasn't powerless to say no.

[A Platypus Rave]

Mar 19, 2022 13:09:10 GMT -5 This Player Hating Mothman said:

Who gets fired is absolutely a Vince decision, but I think it's massively reductive to say "Nick Khan didn't fire people, Vince McMahon fired people". Even in a company where the owner is as hands-on as Vince is in WWE, there is a complicated balance of different people in power and decisions that get made. Even if Nick Khan isn't personally signing death warrants, when he says "We should cut talent in the middle of this pandemic" or "We should lay off the entire live touring department instead of just furloughing them, or even keeping them on the payroll because we're richer than god", Nick Khan is absolutely party to these decisions. Yeah, Vince tried to mindgame AJ on how Heyman was the one who fired Gallows and Anderson, and Vince absolutely signed off on it, but Heyman still politicked away guys he wanted out of the company. They both take a share of that. Anyone who had a conversation aobut how Braun is all this money and they can get a different tall guy for cheaper is involved in the decision to cut Braun.

Like yeah, at the base level, "Nick Khan fired those people" is reductive, and "Vince is in charge, he made the call" is correct, but still itself a reductive read, because then if you zoom out further, yeah. Nick Khan fired those people. The people who tabled this stuff aren't absolved because someone above them wasn't powerless to say no.

Yeah, as I said Khan brought the names up to be cut.

That's entirely on him.

Vince isn't completely innocent either obviously... but... if Nick didn't say hey we should cut all these people they likely wouldn't have been.

[Deleted]

Khan likely ran it by Vince that in order to increase profit and lower budget they gotta get rid of people and so he was likely told names he could not fire but everyone else was game and then he ran the numbers etc and here we are.

But this shit is exactly why IMO atleast Khan cannot even though alot of people predict that he will but he cannot be the one that runs the ship post Vince because he is a numbers guy he doesn't know the value of talent apart from numbers on a sheet because if he did then the likes of Keith Lee and Swerve would still be here.

[eJm]

Mar 19, 2022 13:17:30 GMT -5 A Platypus Rave said:

Mar 19, 2022 13:09:10 GMT -5 This Player Hating Mothman said:

Who gets fired is absolutely a Vince decision, but I think it's massively reductive to say "Nick Khan didn't fire people, Vince McMahon fired people". Even in a company where the owner is as hands-on as Vince is in WWE, there is a complicated balance of different people in power and decisions that get made. Even if Nick Khan isn't personally signing death warrants, when he says "We should cut talent in the middle of this pandemic" or "We should lay off the entire live touring department instead of just furloughing them, or even keeping them on the payroll because we're richer than god", Nick Khan is absolutely party to these decisions. Yeah, Vince tried to mindgame AJ on how Heyman was the one who fired Gallows and Anderson, and Vince absolutely signed off on it, but Heyman still politicked away guys he wanted out of the company. They both take a share of that. Anyone who had a conversation aobut how Braun is all this money and they can get a different tall guy for cheaper is involved in the decision to cut Braun.

Like yeah, at the base level, "Nick Khan fired those people" is reductive, and "Vince is in charge, he made the call" is correct, but still itself a reductive read, because then if you zoom out further, yeah. Nick Khan fired those people. The people who tabled this stuff aren't absolved because someone above them wasn't powerless to say no.

Yeah, as I said Khan brought the names up to be cut.

That's entirely on him.

Vince isn't completely innocent either obviously... but... if Nick didn't say hey we should cut all these people they likely wouldn't have been.

Also, he likely convinced him in that idea better than Barrios and Wilson even though “Why are we wasting so much money hoarding people?” is the same, broad general argument.

[Aceorton]

This thread has triggered an elaborate dream sequence in which Vince owns a steakhouse and brings in Nick Khan as his accountant, and Khan is like, "Why are we spending so much on steak when bologna and hot dogs are cheaper," and now Vince sells only five steaks per day and the rest is bologna and hot dogs and they don't understand why fewer and fewer people want to eat there.

[Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]]

Mar 19, 2022 10:55:56 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one night appearance, you've fired too many people.

The worrying thing is, I don't think they're done firing people. I feel like once Mania's over, we're seeing more culling.

Probably isn't helping that talent is also seeing a ton of incentive to just... leave. Or literally sit hostage like Ali. 

[Deleted]

Mar 19, 2022 10:55:56 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one night appearance, you've fired too many people.

They actually have a pretty big roster still. It seems thin, but no one is making them have four rosters instead of one.

[A Platypus Rave]

Mar 19, 2022 14:31:41 GMT -5 @therealoblivion said:

Mar 19, 2022 10:55:56 GMT -5 Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! said:

Nick Khan decided it was wasteful to hire so many people if you werent going to use all of them. to a degree he was right, actually, as WWE's roster was insanely bloated. the issue is, he went too far and fired so many people that WWE is now a skeleton of what it had before and he got rid of guys who were actively making the company money like Bray Wyatt. when half your women's rumble needs to be filled out by returning vets there for a one night appearance, you've fired too many people.

They actually have a pretty big roster still. It seems thin, but no one is making them have four rosters instead of one.

From all accounts USA and Fox kinda are?

[Feyrhausen]

Mar 19, 2022 13:26:44 GMT -5 @sigmax said:

Khan likely ran it by Vince that in order to increase profit and lower budget they gotta get rid of people and so he was likely told names he could not fire but everyone else was game and then he ran the numbers etc and here we are.

But this shit is exactly why IMO atleast Khan cannot even though alot of people predict that he will but he cannot be the one that runs the ship post Vince because he is a numbers guy he doesn't know the value of talent apart from numbers on a sheet because if he did then the likes of Keith Lee and Swerve would still be here.

Khan wont run things after Vince dies unless the company is sold after his death. If Vince is doing the expected thing and willing his shares to his family then they will running things. Now depending on their attitude Khan may be kept on doing the same thing as now but they will be the final say as Vince is now.