When Paul “Triple H” Levesque gave AEW the most backhanded compliment of all time by congratulating Tony Khan's company for “beating our developmental system” in a sitdown interview with Ariel Helwani for BT Sports, it drew a massive response from both sides of the proverbial aisle.

WWE stans loved it, AEW die-hards took to social media to “congratulate” WWE on their own developments, and both sides dug even deeper into their respective bunkers to prepare for the second round of the Wednesday Night War, which is now being fought across multiple nights and on the Pay-Per-View/”Premium Live Event” scene too.

Fortunately for fans of the second-biggest professional wrestling company in the United States, none other than Chris Jericho came to the defense of his current promotion to take a shot at his former employer and at the man who took his WWF Championship belt at WrestleMania X-8.

Chris Jericho shoots back at Triple H for his AEW slander

When Chris Jericho sat down with Inside The Ropes’ Alex McCarthy for an interview for talkWRESTLING, he was afforded a chance to respond to “The Game's” assertion that AEW was always just competing with WWE's development and that winning the Wednesday Night War was never WWE's intention with moving NXT to TV. And respond he did, as you can read below via the Inside the Ropes write-up for the interview.

“Once again it is just changing the narrative and changing the history, which makes me laugh. Because when it started, it was not developmental, it was a third brand, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and all the other bullsh*t that they said, so of course we [AEW] beat the developmental or whatever you want to call it, but who gives a sh*t?

It’s such old news, and the show sucks, NXT sucks, it’s not a good show, and they know it. Whether they were punished or not, they probably were punished. That’s probably why Triple H said those things because he is angry that we beat them, and he is probably angry that we exist. But you know, we don’t care about WWE, we care about our show, we care about putting on the best stories that we can put on, we care about building our fanbase and building our ratings.”

Oof, I can almost hear JR shouting “Judas Effect! Judas Effect!” with each passing paragraph.

Is Jericho right that NXT wasn't developmental but instead a third brand? Sort of; while the point of NXT has always been to develop new stars for RAW and SmackDown, when the show went to television, Levesque and his DX-turned-NXT partner Shawn Michaels made it a point to try to book big-time bouts in order to draw eyes into their program and away from AEW. He pushed over-30 stars like Adam Cole, Kyle O'Reilly, Johnny Gargano, and Tommaso Ciampa over your run-of-the-mill 25-year-old former college outside linebacker who spent a year in the Performance Center learning to run the ropes and hit a lariat, and would often book matches designed to draw in eyes, like the 60 Minute Iron Man Fatal Four Way Match with Finn Balor, Johnny Gargano, and Tommaso Ciampa that technically took place on a Tuesday but was meant to really pursue adding new fans from the AEW crowd.

But wait, it gets better. Not only did Jericho call out Levesque for his attack on AEW, but suggested that any criticism he levies at the company won't stop their momentum, growth, or existence, as his boss has “a lot more money than your boss.”

“We will continue to exist and I will tell you this, my boss has a lot more money than his boss does. A lot more. So you want to go to that and, we are not going anywhere, we will continue to grow. That p*sses them off and why wouldn’t it? They had a monopoly for so long and don’t like the fact that we exist and that’s fine. We don’t care that they exist, God bless them. They are running a show in front of 50,000 people, why would he care about us? But you know, he should, and he does, and that’s why he said those things.”

Here, Jericho is dead on; WWE really shouldn't care about what AEW is doing, as they're running huge shows and making hundreds of millions of dollars, but clearly, they do. If Levesque really didn't care, he wouldn't have run NXT against AEW back in 2019, and he wouldn't be booking NXT Worlds Collide on the same day as All Out now. While it's understandable that Levesque is an incredibly competitive person, sometimes, that can be a fault, not an asset.