What if Paige brings the Sky Pirates to the main roster?
The IIconics are now the WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions after besting a field of three other teams at WrestleMania 35. On SmackDown, they Peyton Royce and Billie Kay won what was essentially a squash match. In the immediate aftermath, Paige gave a brief interview backstage and commented that she was bringing a tag team to SmackDown next week.
It’s possible that the swerve is in. Though Paige is a woman and she gave her interview immediately after a women’s tag team match, maybe that’s all coincidental to her bringing up a male team like Moustache Mountain from NXT or assembling a pair of under-utilized male talents already on the main roster in a new tandem.
Given the placement of the segment, however, it seems likely Paige will bring up a women’s team, and the simplest answer would be introduce a tag team that is already working as a unit. Kairi Sane and Io Shirai have been such a team on NXT, and spoilers indicate that Sane lost a match at the last NXT TV taping that would bar her from another shot at Shayna Baszler’s title. Could that signal that the Japanese duo is on its way up to the main roster, with the added push of having Paige in their corner?
#3 Paige as the mouthpiece
Kairi Sane and Io Shirai are supremely talented professional wrestlers who have worked nicely as singles performers. In addition to their Japanese roots, they are both noted aerial artists and that has become a particularly exciting element of their act as a duo.
The main limitation that Sane and Shirai face is their English language promos. Whereas Asuka before them was a dominant force in NXT, she has had an inconsistent run on the main roster, and that seems to be at least in part due to her English language capabilities.
Positioning Paige as a manager to do the talking for the team could make a great deal of sense given she’s a familiar, popular face to WWE fans who can’t wrestle on her own anymore. All the more important, she’s good enough on the mic to speak on the pair’s behalf and get them entrenched in meaningful programs sooner than later.