2017 Awards: Spot of the Year
This is a new one.
We always talk about the moves and the matches, but what about the individual moments? Sometimes you have moments that just catch your eye because they’re either shocking, cool, or just something you haven’t seen before. That’s what we’re looking at today, meaning some of these might be big moves while some of them are just people doing something cool.
As should always be the case, we’ll go to NXT first with Roderick Strong superplexing Adam Cole onto the rest of the participants in WarGames at Takeover: WarGames. As is going to be the case more often than not on this list, the visual is what makes the biggest difference here. While I found it to be a bit of a stretch that everyone was just standing there waiting, there’s not much that can be done on that front. It was a great visual and part of an amazing match which needed a signature moment. Check on all three.
Now we’ll get one of the annual options out of the way with Shane McMahon’s Cell dive. It’s always a cool visual but when you reach the point where you know it’s coming, a lot of the excitement goes away. I’ve seen Shane dive off of something so many times now that while there’s a quick thrill, there’s not much more to it than that. You have to mention it because it’s a dive off the Cell, but that’s as far (Or is it low?) as this is going to go.
We’ll head back to the beginning of the year now for another something that involves being up in the air. This time it was at the Royal Rumble with AJ Styles kicking out of the Super AA. That’s John Cena’s mega special move and Styles became one of the first (if not the first) people to kick out of the thing. It made Styles look like he could actually win the match, even if he lost not too long thereafter. That was the kind of NO WAY kickout that was needed though and it’s the biggest thing that happened in one of the best matches of the year.
Next up we have a case where I have no idea which one it was but it doesn’t really matter. The Singh Brothers might not be the most useful team in the world but they’re great at taking big falls. That’s what happened when Randy Orton threw one of them off of the Punjabi Prison at Battleground and my goodness did that boy bounce off of the announcers’ table. You could also put in the time where Orton nearly killed one of them with the suplex onto the table but this one was a longer fall and the only good thing to come out of that horrid match.
Finally though, we have something that spawned a catchphrase and one of the best visuals the company has had in a long time. On April 10, Braun Strowman flipped over an ambulance to seemingly crush Roman Reigns because Strowman WASN’T FINISHED WITH HIM. This was part of one of the best feuds of the year and Strowman looked like the biggest monster not named Brock Lesnar in years. It was just cool, and sometimes that’s what works better than anything else.