EIGHT Big Names Return/Debut At Slammiversary

Make sure to grab your name tag. Things have been changing at a near breakneck pace in the wrestling world with all kinds of names moving from one promotion to another. That is only going to be cranked up in the coming weeks as the WWE wrestlers released back in April will see their 90 day no compete clauses expire, meaning they can wrestle elsewhere. A big chunk of the released names made their debuts on Saturday.

Impact Wrestling was one of the biggest buyers in the free agent market as they could pick up several names who had been stars for them in the past, plus some who had yet to wrestle for them. It turns out that their annual Slammiversary event was being held just after the no compete clauses expired. Slammiversary has come and gone, so who wound up making their debuts?

During Slammiversary 2020, five recently released WWE names either debuted or returned to the company. Two of the names had been announced in advance while the other three were surprises. Here are the names who returned and what they did:

Good Brothers (Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows): Appeared after the main event and attacked Ace Austin and Madman Fulton before posing with Eddie Edwards.

Heath (Heath Slater): Appeared in an in-ring segment and got in a fight with Rohit Raju. After, Scott D’Amore told Heath that he could not be there as he did not work for the company, though Rhino told Heath to come back on Tuesday.

Eric Young: Became the second surprise entrant in the main event for the vacant World Title. While Young did not win, he did attack Rich Swann and re-injure Swann’s knee.

EC3: Appeared after the main event in a short vignette without speaking and was not in the building.

These names are in addition to the Motor City Machine Guns (Alex Shelley and Chris Sabin), who defeated the Rascalz in an open challenge, and Swann, who was the original mystery entrant in the main event.

This was a night of returns. Check out how some of them went down:

Opinion: This is the kind of situation that Impact Wrestling needed to capitalize on as it does not come up all that often. A lot of these names make sense as they were bigger stars in Impact Wrestling and never did much in WWE. I can go for that, but hopefully they are treated as part of the roster rather than the saving grace for the promotion. The company has gone that way before and it did not end well.

Which of these names is the biggest deal? Who else should Impact Wrestling sign? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books. Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. Thank you for reading!