NXT Stand & Deliver 2024: Oba Femi Steals the Show Before Trick Williams Takes the Ending

The opener works because every exchange reinforces the simplest possible contrast: the challengers are faster, the champions hit harder, and neither advantage is enough by itself. Axiom and Frazer attack immediately with dives and combinations, while Corbin and Breakker keep turning one opening into a violent reset. The pace is relentless without becoming unreadable.

The near falls are excellent. Axiom's Golden Ratio interrupts Breakker's spear, the challengers combine an avalanche Spanish Fly with a 450 splash, and Frazer's Phoenix Splash appears to have Corbin beaten until Breakker makes the save. The champions survive because their power can erase twenty seconds of challenger momentum in one move.

Breakker ultimately spears Frazer after Corbin's End of Days takes out Axiom. The finish is decisive and the loss does not damage the challengers, who would win the titles days later on NXT. This is exactly the kind of opener a major NXT event should want.

The triple threat is built around three large wrestlers refusing to wrestle like the stereotype attached to their size. Dijak flies, Briggs throws himself through difficult angles and Femi performs power spots that look unreasonable even when everyone is cooperating perfectly. The match understands that a hoss fight becomes special when the wrestlers can surprise you between the collisions.

The best sequence belongs to Femi lifting both opponents from the turnbuckles and dropping them simultaneously, but the match keeps finding new ways to escalate. Dijak lands Feast Your Eyes on Femi, Briggs pulls the referee out to save the championship opportunity, and Dijak then attacks Briggs with repeated finishers only for Femi to return at the exact moment the match seems stolen. Every wrestler gets a believable path to victory.

Femi catches Dijak and powerbombs him onto Briggs before pinning Briggs. The champion retains without diminishing either challenger and leaves the match looking more complete than when he entered. This is the performance that proves Oba Femi can do far more than look imposing.

The six-woman tag is organized around getting Thea Hail back to the version of herself the crowd liked before Jacy Jayne's influence changed her presentation. Hail supplies the emotion, Jordan supplies the speed and Henley gives the babyface side enough stability that the match can move through six wrestlers without collapsing. The heels control the middle efficiently rather than spectacularly.

The closing stretch finally gives Hail the confrontation with Jayne, though Jayne escapes before taking the loss. Izzi Dame enters instead and gets caught in Hail's Kimura Lock for the submission. The result gives Hail momentum while preserving the larger Hail-Jayne issue for television.

Nothing here is poor, but the match mostly functions as useful roster maintenance between two much stronger championship matches. Its eleven minutes pass easily and leave few images behind. That is enough for its position on the card.

Perez wrestles the match like someone who has finally decided patience is more useful than being liked. Valkyria enters with a damaged arm, so Perez attacks it repeatedly, posts it on the floor and uses the injury to make every escape cost the champion something. The heel turn gives her offense a clearer personality than the frustrated challenger had shown weeks earlier.

Valkyria's comeback creates several convincing near falls, including the Liger Bomb and German suplex sequence, while Perez keeps returning to the arm rather than abandoning the story for larger moves. Tatum Paxley briefly appears at ringside, but Perez removes her without allowing the outside involvement to dominate the finish. The match remains about the two wrestlers and the injury.

Perez counters Nightwing into a hurricanrana, lands Pop Rox and transitions into the crossface for the submission. The title change is decisive and gives Perez her second NXT Women's Championship. It is a strong character-and-body-part match even if it never reaches the card's top tier.

D'Angelo enters with a credibility problem rather than a wrestling problem: he has to convince the audience that Ilja Dragunov might actually lose. The match attacks that problem through physicality. D'Angelo throws Dragunov with heavy suplexes, refuses brass knuckles when they are offered and keeps forcing the champion to win increasingly violent exchanges.

Dragunov's hand injury gives D'Angelo another opening, but the champion sells without becoming helpless. The H-Bomb through the announce table finally changes the match's direction, followed by Torpedo Moscow and a Super H-Bomb back inside. The finishing run is emphatic enough to erase any suggestion that Dragunov escaped.

The result is rarely mysterious because Trick Williams is already waiting beyond this show, but D'Angelo delivers one of his strongest major-event performances. Dragunov retains while making the challenger look more serious than the build had managed. That is high-level champion work.

Williams and Hayes enter with enough history for a blood feud and spend the first half working a surprisingly conventional grudge match. They brawl through the crowd and trade hard strikes, but the match never develops the sense that months of betrayal have made ordinary wrestling impossible. The crowd supplies much of the intensity the structure is holding back.

The final stretch becomes busier rather than more emotional. A referee bump leads to a chair fight, Hayes lands a low blow for two, another referee is knocked out and Nothing But Net cannot produce a count. A second referee removes the chair from Hayes, giving Trick the opening for the Trick Shot.

Trick wins exactly as he should, and the celebration matters because it places him beyond the role of Carmelo Hayes' sidekick permanently. The problem is that the match feels like a large television angle with a premium-event crowd rather than the definitive fight promised by the build. Good result, good atmosphere, merely good match.