Best of 2016: Angle of the Year

It wouldn’t be right if I was on time with these things but they’re mostly written up.  I’ll be able to do more than one a day (not saying twice a day) and hopefully get these done before they’re completely ridiculous. Today we’re going to have something a bit more long term with Angle of the Year (aside from Kurt of course). This time we have the best stories of the year and see which ones were the absolute strongest, be it for comedy, drama or just good storytelling in general. As usual, these are in no particular order and only WWE stories were considered.

1. Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens Are Best Friends

You might be seeing Jericho on here later but this one deserves its own entry. These two have been the top heels on “Monday Night Raw” for a few months now (depending on what mood Stephanie McMahon is in that week) and have produced some great comedic moments. Jericho has had one of the best career resurgences I can remember in recent years in 2016 and his material with Owens is some of the best stuff he’s done this year.

I can get the idea that the constant teases of breakups are getting annoying but it’s going to make things even better when they finally do split up for good, likely due to Jericho putting Owens on the list. I know Jericho is going to get most of the praise for this team but Owens has more than pulled his weight throughout the entire angle. He’s been a perfect partner for Jericho and the World Title makes the story seem even more important.

Above all else though, the story has been funny. They have great chemistry together and Owens is so great at insulting a crowd that Jericho has something to bounce off of. It’s been funny, had some drama and is just all around entertaining. That’s really hard to do in today’s WWE and these two Canadians have done it as well as anyone has in a good while.

2. Heath Slater Has Kids!

If there’s one person who has been playing with the house’s money all year and has no business being this high on the card for this long, it’s Slater. After a few weeks of being bounced back and forth between the two shows in an attempt to earn a contract, Slater was given an ultimatum: find a partner to win the Smackdown Tag Team Title tournament or get out for good. In what might be the surprise of the year, Slater and Rhyno actually won the titles and earned Slater a contract. Why is this so important you ask?

As the title says, Heath Slater has kids! This turned into a battle cry for Slater, who had somewhere between two and ten kids (who we would eventually meet). He and his very redneck wife had a dream of installing an above ground pool while eating spray cheese and crackers like a real, middle class family.

This was a great example of what “Smackdown Live” does best: take something so simple and basic as Heath Slater is a country boy and turn it into a story. They wound up getting some crazy mileage out of it, especially when you consider how much Slater has floundered over the years. This gave him a much longer shelf life in WWE and was entertaining at the same time. That’s a great story and one of the best angles of the year.

3. James Ellsworth

Nothing specific here but rather just Ellsworth in general. Ellsworth appeared over the summer as a victim of Braun Strowman and then came back later on in the year as AJ Styles’ mystery tag team partner. While Ellsworth was attacked and replace by Miz, Dean Ambrose took notice and eventually made Ellsworth something like a charity case, treating him as a little buddy for the next few months.

This turned into one heck of a roll for Ellsworth, who went on to defeat Styles three times in a row, earning himself a WWE contract and Smackdown World Title shot in the process. Above all else though, the key to Ellsworth was he barely ever had a single offensive maneuver. Most of his offense was either done by Ambrose behind the referee’s back or some pathetic right hands. Ellsworth’s only move, a superkick, was dubbed No Chin Music due to his, shall we say, oddly shaped face. When Ambrose wasn’t helping, Styles defeated Ellsworth in less than a minute, though Carmella of all people took a liking to Ellsworth next.

While there is certainly a case to be made that Ellsworth overstayed his welcome, I classify him as someone who is completely harmless and rather entertaining at times. There’s just something entertaining about this weird looking guy going further and further every week, only to get destroyed when it came down to a straight match. The character goes too far if it’s something like Eugene, who was put in a competitive match against Triple H at one point. Ellsworth wasn’t very good and was never treated as very good, which kept him as harmless and entertaining like he should have been.

4. Broken Matt Hardy

I’ve said almost all I can say about this story but my goodness does it get much more amazing than this? I’m really not a big fan of it as the Broken Universe has almost nothing to do with wrestling but GOOD GRIEF the effort put into this has been remarkable. Hardy has literally created his own set of rules and an actual continuity behind them to turn it into one of the most creative things I’ve ever seen.

I know the wrestling isn’t all that outstanding (if you can even still call it wrestling most of the time) but that’s not the point here. It’s given the Hardys a completely new take on wrestling and turned them into something interesting for the first time in way too long. Some of the big matches have gotten repetitive but the original Final Deletion is still outstanding.

That being said, I’m not sure where it goes from here. Hardy is seemingly starting to run out of ideas and the story really has run its course. Like, how do you do more than an entire show built around a single idea? It’s very entertaining but I’m hoping they cut it off before it gets all stale, which TNA has a major problem avoiding a lot of the time.

5. Mick Foley and Sami Zayn

This is an odd one but the talking has carried it to the levels the company has likely been shooting for. Much like Ellsworth, this one starts with an incident involving Strowman. For weeks, the monster known as Strowman had been demanding that “Monday Night Raw” General Manager Foley give him more competition, but that only resulted in a string of rather boring handicap matches. One night, Zayn answered but Strowman wasn’t interested in someone Zayn’s size.

Eventually they did fight and, as is his custom, Zayn was completely destroyed. He wanted a rematch and Foley said no, prompting Zayn to demand a trade to “Smackdown Live”. Foley agreed and the trade offered was Zayn for…..Eva Marie. This set Zayn off and brought out a fire in him that Foley had wanted all along. There was never any trade agreed to and Zayn was given his rematch with Strowman, which he somehow won by lasting the same amount of time as Strowman (just because it’s entertaining doesn’t mean everything has to make sense).

This story worked because it had a distinct arc. Zayn grew a lot out of it and Foley gave him a strong endorsement in the process. One of the keys to this was the fact that Strowman never actually pinned Zayn. Strowman might have had him dead to rites in their first match but Foley stopped it for the sake of saving Zayn’s health. The fact that Zayn wrestled to a draw (or a win as it seems to be called now) was a big moment for him, though I’d be surprised if Strowman doesn’t annihilate him in the final match between the two. If so, at least it was a good story to get us there.

6. The List of Jericho

Where do you even begin with this one? Earlier in the year, Jericho debuted the Gift of Jericho, which was basically just him posing like an imbecile and letting everyone praise him. Eventually he started calling things the “insert name here” of Jericho, culminating with an incident on the September 19 episode of “Monday Night Raw’.

Foley had been getting on Jericho’s nerves so Jericho said Foley was going on the list. Soon thereafter, Jericho started carrying a physical list with him and wrote down various names and things that annoyed him. This led to a VERY popular catchphrase of “YOU JUST MADE THE LIST!”. It turned out that Jericho was actually writing things down the entire time and he actually released it, complete with spelling errors, on his Facebook page.

One of the most important keys to this though has been how everyone has sold it. People like Xavier Woods and Ellsworth seemed terrified of being put on the list and nearly begged Jericho not to put them on. When everyone is playing along (except for McMahon who is of course WAY too cool for something like this), it makes the angle that much stronger. This whole thing worked as well as anything Jericho has done in several years and I continue to be in awe of everything he does. It’s the most entertaining thing I’ve seen all year and is going to be hard to top.

7. Randy Orton Joins the Wyatt Family

We’ll wrap it up with something that not only made sense, but has been played off very well. Orton and Wyatt feuded with each other for a few months with the rest of the Wyatt Family attacking Orton almost every time. Unlike most of the Wyatts’ victims, instead of getting partners to help him with the fight, Orton said “if you can’t beat em, join em”, and that’s exactly what he did.

In the weeks since then, the fans have been waiting on Orton to turn on Wyatt in a big swerve and it just hasn’t come yet. While I can’t imagine this partnership is going to last until “Wrestlemania XXXIII”, it’s still done a very good job at giving us some storytelling, along with FINALLY giving Wyatt his first title in WWE. That was long overdue and it took Orton to actually get us there.

This story isn’t rewriting anything or doing anything we haven’t seen before but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been good. Orton is the kind of guy that can go from good to evil at the drop of a hat and that’s something that can make this story work so well. I’m sure Orton will turn on Wyatt at some point but all that matters is how big the pop is when that first RKO connects. Until then, just sit back and enjoy something being done by good wrestlers.

You might have noticed how I put these nominees together. That’s right: it’s been on a list, and that’s the choice here. The List of Jericho is even more proof of what happens when you take the dumbest ideas in the world and give it to someone as talented as Jericho. I’ve had more fun seeing Jericho put people on that List than I’ve gotten out of anything else this year and there’s a good chance it’s going to put him back in the World Title picture. Also, I’m going with this over the Broken Universe because, very simply put, the List has led to more wrestling instead of insanity that doesn’t serve many people other than Matt and Jeff.  That’s more than enough for the best angle of the year.

Remember to follow me on Twitter @kbreviews and pick up my new book, KB’s Complete Monday Nitro and Thunder Reviews Volume V at Amazon for just $3.99 at:

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