2017 Awards: Worst Wrestler of the Year

What a group of nominees to pick from.

Now this one almost completely depends on your definition of bad. There are some people who don’t belong in a ring no matter what they do and there are some people who just don’t ever change and serve very little purpose other than being a warm body. At the same time, there are people who I just don’t like who will be on here as well. It’ll be a mix of all three as this is really hard to define.

Before we get into this, I’m going to leave Shane McMahon off because I consider him to be someone who wrestles on occasion rather than a wrestler.

We’ll start with Tamina, who has been around forever and yet still has almost no reason to be there. Considering she debuted at the same time as the Usos, you really would expect her to have gotten at least somewhat better now. Her Superfly Splash isn’t terrible but there’s a gaping hole of charisma whenever she’s in the ring and I often forget she’s out there.

Sticking with the women there’s Lana, who is managing to set new standards for bad wrestling. At the end of the day though, I really can’t blame her for this one. She’s been wrestling less than two years now and hasn’t even had 75 matches yet with her first singles match coming about thirteen months ago. I have no idea what WWE was expecting when they threw her in the ring other than hoping people would swoon over her in the outfits (fair enough) but it’s not fair to put her out there like that. Just let her be a full time manager or go train for a LONG time before getting back in the ring because this isn’t fair.

I wouldn’t feel right without including the Young Bucks in here. Yes they’re athletic freaks and can be entertaining a lot of the time, but the superkick parties and almost never selling enough and the lack of any form of psychology to most of their matches puts them near the top. Though they did block me on Twitter so I must be doing something right.

A name that you’ll probably see on a lot of these lists is Jinder Mahal and while I couldn’t stand him for most of the year, there’s a huge difference between someone who is boring, repetitive and in way over his head than someone who is worthless. There’s value in Mahal, but he was being put in a spot he wasn’t ready for. Those are two different things and I’m not going to fault Mahal for the bad booking. I’ll fault him for being a boring promo and a repetitive wrestler though, which is quite bad on its own at such a high level.

Now someone on the other end of the spectrum is Dolph Ziggler, who is more than capable of having a good match but hasn’t changed his style in what feels like years. His meta stuff with the entrances isn’t doing anything for me and I really could go with him being away for a very long time, hopefully to recharge his batteries and change things up a bit as his style got old a long, long time ago.

That brings us to the winner and, in what shouldn’t be a surprise, I’m going with Enzo Amore. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I can’t stand him more than once for a variety of reasons, including he doesn’t change anything. It’s been the same “how you doin” promo and never shutting up, while almost never actually wrestling. When he does it’s not any good and we’re stuck with Enzo as champion while 205 Live dies because he gets so much attention. It’s a bad way to run things and the division has died even more with him on top. Get him out of here already so the division can actually have a chance.