2010s ~ THE DECADE IN LISTS, PART ONE

Hello.

Let‘s begin this series by starting it. 

We’re going to talk about the 2010s now.

This being the first of multiple parts, we can do the entire introduction thing here, I think, and try and not inflict that upon later parts in the series.

Welcome to the only year decade in review series that matters.

I certainly didn’t come up with the idea of a blog post or piece of work in general summing up a period of time. Even if many never get to do a full decade like I have now, I cannot claim copyright on this. Some of my friends have done some spectacular decade-focused podcasts over on the WKDW network. However, I believe that nobody in any format does this specific thing on a more in depth basis than I do or offers up as much (in wrestling coverage or personally, cut your heart open for the world or don’t fucking bother, cowards) in an individual piece or sries as I do. Call it pride of authorship or whatever you’d like, but this is my baby, and I do not believe a single version of this concept exists that is better than the original, attempts to sincerely flatter me aside.

Sincerely, I appreciate everyone reading this, and if you actually read the entire thing, no matter how long it takes, know that I appreciate you even more.

If you happen to be a newer reader, I may suggest that you maybe familiarize yourself not only with the kind of site this is, but also the format of these pieces, by going and reading the YEAR IN LISTS piece that all lead up to this, collected here for your benefit:

• 2010
• 2011
• 2012
• 2013
• 2014
• 2015
• 2016
• 2017
• 2018
• 2019

(2010 & 2019 are different from the rest, existing as works in progress en route to really nailing the format and process, and I don’t stand by those — the details anyways, the bigger picture is mostly still how I feel — with the same confidence as every other YEAR IN LISTS piece.)

It’s honestly a little stunning that we even made it this far.

The great thing about long term project, or at least the thing I appreciate the most, is that you can occupy yourself for a long time with the process alone, and I have always taken a significant part of the joy here from the process, as I think you almost have to to keep doing things like this. That’s not to say I never planned on doing this larger thing, it was the entire point, but it sort of snuck up on me suddenly with very little preparation outside of sort of a general idea in my head of what these would look like.

So first, an overview.

Rather than the usual, as this is the end of a larger process and covers ten times as much ground as usual, everything is bigger. One-hundred weird little no-review recommendations (mostly) with links to full pieces about them. Twenty-five shows, twenty-five tag teams, the ten best promotions of the decade, and later on in their own individual pieces, the one-hundred best matches and wrestlers of the decade.

A usual warning here also applies, which we should get out of the way early. Not all wrestlers are good people, not all great wrestling involves good people, and a whole lot of it this decade was done by some people who seem to be pretty bad, to varying degrees. Words of praise, or implied praise by being on this list in any form, is praise for the work alone. So, while I am going to again do everyone a solid and try to mostly show these people getting beaten up so as to celebrate them a little less and to avoid them as much as possible in those Recommended Matches scrtions, I would like to avoid repeating this every time they show up on one of these (although those WOTD blurbs are going to be real short).

Lastly, I don’t want to hear anything out of any of you about “[match x] was higher than [match y] on the YEAR IN LISTS”, and that goes for shows too. The process is the process, a lot of star ratings will be near equal, but final determinations are made based on feelings and guts when I look at these things as I write them. The idea expressed on past lists about star ratings being a guideline applies here as it pertains to past lists. Something can be a better show or match in that year than when thinking about the larger decade, I think, or you can chalk it up to a thing I’ve noticed here about how covering ten times as much time has a way of flattening things down to a raw feeling or memory of how something felt.

Wrestling is more art than science, something like a 60/40 split minimum, and so a list (mostly) about wrestling works in the same way.

 

 

I want to give you a few zero research bullshit categories too.

 

TOP TEN PROMOS/TALKIES OF THE DECADE (CHRONOLOGICAL):

1. NXT Redemption Cast, “Know Your Pro”
2. CM Punk & John Cena, “The New York Yankees”
3. The Briscoes, “Violent People”
4. Eddie Kingston, “The Best Man At My Wedding”
5. The Briscoes, “Cosmetically Pleasing”
6. The Briscoes, “Terry Funk Ain’t Wear No Mouthpiece”
7. CM Punk, “Just Too Short”
8. Daniel Bryan & John Cena, “A Parody”
9. Kevin Owens vs. Full Sail
10. Roman Reigns, “…”

TOP TEN MOVIES OF THE DECADE (CHRONOLOGICAL):

1. FAST FIVE (2011, Lin)
2. THE RAID: REDEMPTION (2011, Evans)
3. THE MASTER (2012, P.T. Anderson)
4. BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013, Linklater),
5. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015, Miller)
6. EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! (2016, Linklater)
7. POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING (2016, Schaffer & Taccone)
8. THE NICE GUYS (2016, Black)
9. FIGHTING IN THE AGE OF LONELINESS (2018, Bois)
10. THE IRISHMAN (2019, Scorsese)

 

TOP TEN RIVALRIES/SERIES OF THE DECADE:

1. Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Kazuchika Okada
2. John Cena vs. CM Punk
3. Daniel Bryan vs. The Shield
4. L.A. Park vs. Rush
5. Strong BJ vs. The Twin Towers
6. Biff Busick vs. Drew Gulak vs. Timothy Thatcher vs. Zack Sabre Jr.
7. Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Shinsuke Nakamura
8. The Young Bucks vs. Kevin Steen
9. Wotan vs. Demus
10. Kazuchika Okada vs. Kenny Omega

 

TOP TEN WRESTLING YEARS OF THE DECADE:

1. 2015
2. 2013
3. 2011
4. 2016
5. 2014
6. 2012
7. 2017
8. 2010
9. 2018
10. 2019

 

 

HOOT/CATCH-ALL/OTHER MATCH RECOMMENDATION OF THE DECADE:

 

1. Finlay vs. Mike Knox, WWE Superstars (1/7/2010)
2. Black Terry/Dr. Cerebro vs. Gringo Loco/El Hijo Del Diablo, IWRG (1/24/2010)
3. Brodie Lee vs. Hallowicked, CHIKARA A Touch of Class (1/31/2010)
4. The Young Bucks vs. The Switchblade Conspiracy, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2010 Night Two (3/6/2010)
5. Thumbtack Jack vs. JC Bailey, CZW Walking On Pins & Needles (3/13/2010)
6. Goldust vs. Dolph Ziggler, WWE Fan Cam ~ San Francisco, CA (3/14/2010)
7. Nick Gage vs. Abdullah Kobayashi, CZW Tournament of Death IX (6/26/2010)
8. Ricochet vs. Chuck Taylor vs. Adam Cole vs. Arik Cannon, DGUSA Enter The Dragon 2010 (7/24/2010)
9. Goldust vs. William Regal, WWE Superstars (8/26/2010)
10. Ric Flair vs. Mick Foley, TNA Impact (10/7/2010)
11. Takeshi Ono vs. Ryuji Hijikata, FUTEN BATI BATI 40 (10/24/2010)
12. Sami Callihan vs. Alex Colon, CZW From Small Beginnings Comes Great Things (1/7/2011)
13. The Briscoes vs. The Nigerian Nightmares, CZW Proving Grounds (5/14/2011)
14. Virus vs. Guerrera Maya Jr., CMLL on CadenaTres (6/7/2011)
15. Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Toru Yano, NJPW G1 Climax 21 Day Nine (8/13/2011)
16. Madison Eagles vs. Cheerleader Melissa, SHIMMER Volume 44 (10/2/2011)
17. The Young Bucks vs. Future Shock, PWG Steen Wolf (10/22/2011)
18. Strong BJ vs. SMOP, AJPW 40th Anniversary New Years Shining Series (1/3/2012)
19. Sami Callihan vs. AR Fox, DGUSA Open the Golden Gate (1/27/2012)
20. Mercedes Martinez vs. Athena, SHIMMER Volume 45 (3/17/2012)
21. CM Punk vs. Jerry Lawler, WWE Raw (8/27/2012)
22. Rey Mysterio vs. Michael McGillicutty, WWE Saturday Morning Slam (10/6/2012)
23. CM Punk vs. Vince McMahon, WWE Raw (10/8/2012)
24. Laughter7 vs. Shinsuke Nakamura/Tomohiro Ishii, NJPW World Tag League Final (12/2/2012)
25. Masakatsu Funaki vs. Akebono, AJPW New Years Shining Series 2013 Day Eight (1/26/2013)
26. Arisa Nakajima vs. Yumiko Hotta, JWP Mania-X 2013 (4/14/2013)
27. Blue Panther vs. Virus, CMLL Guerreros del Ring (5/12/2013)
28. Charles Lucero vs. Rey Hechicero, Noches de Coliseo (8/4/2013)
29. Blue Panther/Negro Casas/Atlantis vs. Black Terry/Negro Navarro/Solar I, CMLL on Televisa (8/16/2013)
30. AR Fox vs. Alex Colon vs. Shane Strickland vs. Andrew Everett, CZW Down With the Sickness (9/14/2013)
31. Madison Eagles vs. Nicole Matthews, SHIMMER Volume 58 (10/19/2013)
32. CM Punk/Rey Mysterio/Cody Rhodes/Goldust/The Usos vs. The Shield/The Wyatt Family, WWE Smackdown (11/29/2013)
33. CIMA vs. Super Shisa, DG Fantastic Gate 2013 Day One (12/7/2013)
34. Kana vs. Meiko Satomura, Kana Pro Mania (2/25/2014)
35. The Briscoes vs. Outlaw Inc., ROH Raising The Bar Night Two (3/2/2014)
36. Trevor Lee vs. Andrew Everett vs. Cedric Alexander, PWG Mystery Vortex II (3/28/2014)
37. The Briscoes vs. The Hardy Boyz, OMEGA Chaos in Cameron (4/26/2014)
38. Hornswoggle vs. El Torito, WWE Extreme Rules Kickoff (5/4/2014)
39. Jun Kasai vs. Matt Tremont, CZW Tournament of Death 13 (6/14/2014)
40. AJ Styles vs. Karl Anderson, NJPW G1 Climax 24 Day Nine (8/4/2014)
41. Jay Lethal vs. ACH, ROH Wrestling (8/23/2014)
42. Masato Yoshino/Shingo Takagi/Masato Yoshino vs. BxB Hulk/Masaaki Mochizuki/Dragon Kid, DG Summer Adventure Tag League 2014 Day Four (9/9/2014)
43. Dolph Ziggler vs. Cesaro vs. Tyson Kidd, WWE Smackdown (11/14/2014)
44. Biff Busick vs. Mike Bailey, Beyond Alive & Kicking (11/29/2014)
45. Rey Mysterio Jr./Myzteziz vs. El Hijo Del Perro Aguayo/Pentagon Jr., AAA Rey del Reyes 2015 (3/18/2015)
46. Trevor Lee vs. Mike Bailey, PWG Don’t Sweat the Technique (4/3/2015)
47. Roman Reigns vs. The Big Show, WWE Extreme Rules (4/26/2015)
48. Roderick Strong/The Briscoes vs. Matt Sydal/ACH/Alberto el Patron, ROH Wrestling (5/9/2015)
49. Mike Bailey vs. Danny Cannon, Beyond Americanrana ‘15 (7/26/2015)
50. Daisuke Sekimoto vs. Ryuji Ito, BJW (8/16/2015)
51. Virus vs. Dr. Cerebro, Chilanga Mask (8/16/2015)
52. Mike Bailey vs. AR Fox, CZW Down With The Sickness (9/12/2015)
53. Cedric Alexander vs. Moose, ROH All Star Extravaganza VII (9/18/2015)
54. Suwama/Yuji Okabayashi vs. Daisuke Sekimoto/Kazuyuki Fujita, Tenryu Project Revolution Final (11/15/2015)
55. Bayley vs. Eva Marie, WWE NXT (11/25/2015)
56. Chuck Taylor vs. Kikutaro, PWG All Star Weekend 11 Night Two (12/12/2015)
57. Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Johnny Kidd, IPW-UK Christmas Cracker 2015 (12/20/2015)
58. Low Ki/Homicide vs. Da Hit Squad, Beyond Fete Finale (12/27/2015)
59. Pagano vs. Caifan, Lucha Memes Rumble 2016 (1/24/2016)
60. Masaaki Mochizuki vs. T-Hawk, DG King of Gate 2016 Day Two (5/11/2016)
61. Alabama Doink vs. Heidenreich, AWF Golden Corral Show (5/21/2016)
62. Will Ospreay vs. Mike Bailey, RPW Angle vs. Sabre Jr. (6/12/2016)
63. BJ Whitmer vs. Steve Corino, ROH Best in the World 2016 (6/24/2016)
64. Rey Escorpión vs. Mascara Dorada, LLE on Lucha Azteca 7 (7/28/2016)
65. AR Fox vs. Matt Tremont, Beyond Americanrana ‘16 (7/31/2016)
66. Donovan Dijak vs. Lio Rush, ROH Reach for the Sky Night Two (11/19/2016)
67. Wotan vs. Demus 316, Lucha Libre GH (1/14/2017)
68. Shingo Takagi/T-Hawk/El Lindaman/Cyber Kong vs. Naruki Doi/Takehiro Yamamura/Big R Shimizu/Ben-K, DG Truth Gate 2017 Day Two (2/2/2017)
69. Wotan vs. Impulso, WMC (2/11/2017)
70. Drew Galloway vs. DJZ, AAW Homecoming 2017 (3/17/2017)
71. Ethan Page vs. Darby Allin, EVOLVE 81 (3/31/2017)
72. Brock Lesnar vs. Goldberg, WWE WrestleMania 33 (4/2/2017)
73. Ultimo Guerrero vs. Atlantis, CMLL Super Viernes (4/14/2017)
74. Low Ki vs. Trevor Lee vs. Andrew Everett, Impact Wrestling (5/18/2017)
75. Oney Lorcan vs. Hideo Itami, WWE NXT (6/28/2017)
76. Brock Lesnar vs. Samoa Joe, WWE Great Balls of Fire (7/9/2017)
77. Kenny Omega vs. Toru Yano, NJPW G1 Climax 27 Day Six (7/25/2017)
78. Lars Sullivan vs. Oney Lorcan, WWE NXT (9/27/2017)
79. Orange Cassidy vs. UltraMantis Black, PBTV Futures (10/22/2017)
80. Wotan vs. Demus 3:16, Generacion XXI (12/18/2017)
81. Joe Doering vs. Zeus, AJPW New Year Wars 2018 Day One (1/2/2018)
82. Ricky Marvin vs. Keyra, Lucha Memes (1/7/2018)
83. Demus 316 vs. Wotan, Tortas Super Astro (2/3/2018)
84. Demus 316 vs. Fuerza Guerrera, Innova Aztec Power (2/4/2018)
85. Bobby Gunns vs. Mike Bailey, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2018 Day Two (3/10/2018)
86. Soberano Jr. vs. El Barbaro Cavernario, CMLL Martes Arena Mexico (3/27/2018)
87. Demus 316 vs. Wotan, Club Apolo (4/1/2018)
88. Suwama vs. Jun Akiyama, AJPW Champion Carnival 2018 Day Seven (4/15/2018)
89. Shayna Baszler vs. Dakota Kai, WWE NXT (5/30/2018)
90. Minoru Suzuki/Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Tomohiro Ishii/Toru Yano, NJPW Dominion 6.9 (6/9/2018)
91. Rey Fenix vs. El Barbaro Cavernario, CMLL Super Viernes (6/29/2018)
92. Kota Ibushi vs. Toru Yano, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Six (7/21/2018)
93. L.A. Park/The Lucha Brothers vs. Rush/The Briscoes, CMLL Super Viernes (8/3/2018)
94. Masashi Takeda vs. Alex Colon, GCW Nick Gage Invitational 3: Thy Kingdom Come (9/8/2018)
95. Trevor Lee vs. Darby Allin, PWG Smokey & The Bandido (10/19/2018)
96. Ultimo Guerrero vs. Corsario Negro Jr., FILLM 21 (11/3/2018)
97. Caifan vs Ultimo Guerrero, XMW (2/16/2019)
98. WALTER vs. Rey Fenix, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2019 Night Two (3/9/2019)
99. Jonathan Gresham vs. Masashi Takeda, GCW Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport (4/4/2019)
100. Dominic Garrini vs. Josh Bishop, AIW Slumber Party Massacre (4/4/2019)

 

 

SHOW OF THE DECADE:

 

It might be helpful at the start of these to define what it is I’m looking for.

For the last few years of SHOW OF THE YEAR, without many truly great wrestling shows happening, the lists were largely made up of shows with multiple great matches and as few weaknesses as possible, just so as to get to that nice round number. Not no weaknesses, but the lowest number of them I could find on shows that also had major strengths.

In some aspects, this is frustrating.

Through these lists, I always want to represent a wide swath of things, but more than in any other category, this is dominated by larger promotions. Not to say this is all WWE and New Japan, there’s also a ton of PWG in there, but primarily, it belongs to the big feds and the super indies, and the way the ordering shook out is also not something I loved either, as it turned into a list where promotions took up entire chunks. It belongs to the companies that could afford the best talent in the world (or happened to exist in the first half of the decade before all of them began getting snatched up) and usually with the foresight and production values to make shows feel like big deals rather than a collection of individual bits. I would wager that in most decades the same is true. In the 90s, probably WWF, WCW, ECW, New Japan, and All Japan. In the 2000s, the list is honestly probably the WWF/E for the first few years, and then primarily ROH and NOAH. You have your outliers — as does this list — but primarily, great shows are put on by a select few promotions with either the resources or the vision, occasionally both at the same time even if that vision is fleeting and accidental, because truly, it is not easy to produce an all-around or top to bottom great wrestling show.

Howard Hawks famously said that a great movie was three good scenes and no bad ones. That’s sort of how I always thought about great wrestling shows for these lists, in spirit anyways, trying to find and focus on shows with major positives and very few negatives, in so much as I was ever able to find them, as pro wrestling is certainly not the movies, and a wrestling show with zero weaknesses (we can define bad scenes here as bad matches or bad segments) is a very hard thing to come by. One of the best shows of the decade, and really of all time, still has a Brie Bella vs. Kelly Kelly match on it, you know?

A great show is more than just matches though.

The best wrestling shows, to me, are more than just matches. Maybe there are weaknesses, but the best shows have a flow or some kind of narrative quality to them. An obvious show-long story with one guy or a handful of guys, maybe just a broader trend, some sense of remarkable construction, or a real feeling of a special moment — be it something planned by the promotion or just something more personal —  on top of that Hawksian (Road Warrior Hawskian?) ideal.

Not a lot of shows this decade fit this, but a batch of shows in the 2010s did, and they’re among my favorite wrestling shows of all time.

First though, some others that either for reasons of not making the cut compared to better versions of the same thing or just being edged out, but that I still think ought to be recognized.

 

HONORABLE MENTIONS (BULLSHIT):

 

TNA “BOUND FOR GLORY 2010” (10/10/2010) ~ DAYTONA BEACH, FL & TNA “IMPACT” (10/14/2010) ~ ORLANDO, FL [TIE]

 

The death sentence probably came close to a year earlier when the Hogan and Bischoff signing were officially announced, made all that clearer on that famous January 4th, but this is the announcement in real time, and it is both (a) pretty funny (see above), and (b) the sort of Bad Wrestling and Bad Wrestling TV that I think everyone ought to see on a pure anthropological level.

Bound For Glory itself isn’t entirely useless, although it’s all downhill after the Machine Guns vs. Generation Me opener. This show and the one following it are monuments to one of the funnier moments in wrestling this decade, and this total and complete confidence in something that was clearly wrong, the total reversal of the direction that briefly and finally allowed TNA to turn a profit at the end of the year before. As for the follow up, there is virtually no wrestling on this episode, seeing the closest thing to the realization of the full Vince Russo vision since the March 14th, 1999 episode of Heat. Following the 10/10/2010 SWERVE founding of Immortal, TNA spends the majority of its first hour explaining the angle in excruciating detail. It’s a very bad show, but it’s one of the most fascinating episodes of television ever produced.

You can explain TNA’s entire trajectory in the 2010s by watching these shows, and any time an entire promotion or a period of time for a company is summed up by one show, I find that incredibly interesting.

While the actual 2010 Show of the Year does not stand up to the competition for the rest of the decade, these shows are simply too interesting to ignore.

 

 

WWE TALKING SMACK (FIRST SIX MONTHS)

 

The other parts of this are supplemental WWE programming that, for some six to twelve months, were so wildly unlike anything else presented by the company that, like the two weird TNA shows, they exist as some of the more interesting wrestling programming of the entire decade. 

First, we have Talking Smack. 

Everyone always remembers the famous Miz promo, but there’s so much more than that, even in terms of pure seriousness. The Dean Ambrose and John Cena dueling Talking Smack segments in the fall are especially spirited, offering the sort of work we never got from Moxley on television itself (under a WWE umbrella anyways, as they clearly preview the sort of rawness and realness that has made AEW Mox so great) and an extended cut of classic Cena Ace material, respectively. The real beauty of the show stems from what allowed them to do those things though, the rare look at total freedom in the WWE, not only allowing great talkers to go wild for five to ten minutes at a time, but letting less experienced ones really flesh out who and what they were/are as characters. Ideally, there was a combination of all of that and some real comedy, as seen with every Bryan and AJ Styles interaction talking about flat Earth or the moon landing, Heath Slater buying a timeshare, or Bryan’s love for the Hype Bros. However, it’s the picture above that is the actual greatest Talking Smack bit ever, from the December 20th episode, in which Rhino shows up as Santa Claus and spends the episode getting drunker and increasingly inappropriate.

Like its spiritual predecessor, to follow here, 2016 Talking Smack was too good and funny and weird to ever last. Someone eventually noticed it, and by early 2017, Bryan found himself replaced with either Shane McMahon or JBL, ruining the spirit of the thing. However, that just goes to show how great the three or four months that this got to exist in its original form were. If it wasn’t as great as it was and in the specific ways in which it was, a company like the WWE never would have killed it.

If one of these episodes hosted a single match, it would have been one of the best shows of the year when it happened, and at least on the shortlist for being on of the better shows of the decade, as truly, it was one of the few examples of pro wrestling appointment viewing to exist in this ten year span.

Alas.

 

 

WWE NXT REDEMPTION

 

My pet favorite.

Some time ago, out in the real world, someone whose opinion I genuinely valued in terms of real world stuff (if you are a long term reader, this was Bruce, and if you are not that, you have some great stuff awaiting you in MONTHS OF THE DECADE) told me that, generally, I will never value stupid and/or meaningless bullshit at any other point in the same way that I would value stupid and/or meaningless bullshit that I experienced in real time in my early 20s.

If nothing else, my affinity for 2011-12 NXT, specifically this formless and endless season, proves this correct.

So, one more time for the people in the back, one of my favorite things I wrote when covering 2011, if not the favorite –

The first four seasons of NXT all lasted four months tops. The fifth lasted over fifteen. The first four seasons of NXT had winners. The fifth simply had a survivor, as when NXT turned into NXTin June 2012, Derrick Bateman was the only contestant still on the show. Even he wasn’t an original contestant, instead joining the cast in WEEK SEVENTEEN to replace Conor O’Brien when he was eliminated. Nobody replaced the other eliminated contestants. The aim was nebulous at best, with the winner (which never came) being promised the chance to pick their own pro for Season Six, with the caveat that it was full of former competitors from the previous seasons. There was never a season six (or a movie). This simply wound up going on forever, and at some point, the concept of these men having a Pro or this being any sort of competition was forgotten about.

Instead, it was a show where everyone there seemed to hate being there, and it eventually made everyone insane. Tyler Reks and Curt Hawkins feuded with General Manager William Regal and tried to get traded, only for him to make them janitors for months on end instead, which somehow dovetailed into a screwball caper involving Matt Striker being kidnapped for a month. The Prime Time Players formed at some point, feuded with The Usos for an indeterminable stretch of time, and were traded to the “main” roster for no real reason, but not before they briefly had tensions over the romantic affections of Tamina Snuka. Tyson Kidd and Michael McGillicutty had a feud over (a) failson Michael being mad at Kidd being friends with other second generation guys just because he grew up with the Harts, (b) what it means to be a failson, and (c) Michael stealing Kidd’s wife’s panties and smelling them. Vladimir Kozlov got super into planking in the summer of 2011. Trent Baretta had a run on the show and, along with Kidd, had one of those random C-show three boy runs that people in WWE stumble into sometimes.

The highlight was a six month plus romance quadrangle involving Derrick Bateman (aka EC3’s dead cousin, who we will remember as this and not what his alter-ego turned into), Maxine (aka Katrina of Lucha Underground, with Regal occasionally referring to her as the devil in a great piece of accidental fanwank), Johnny Curtis (aka Fandango), and Kaitlyn (aka Kaitlyn). At some point, the evil Maxine dumped charmingly stupid hunk Bateman for hanging out with Kaitlyn too much, and began consorting with evil pervert Johnny Curtis (complete with unmarked grey van) to upset him. Johnny Curtis then began introducing a chloroform rag, kidnapping Matt Striker with it, and asking everyone in sight if they wanted to get weird. He turned a men’s restroom into his private office, and constantly alluded to also having a van office and a basement office. He and Maxine schemed either to get off of NXT together by doing…something?…to William Regal to force his hand, but were also incredibly willing to stab each other in the back at the drop of a hat, no matter who was offering, only for all of their schemes to backfire.

Sometimes Bateman and Kaitlyn went on capers to stop them, but sometimes plans just fell apart when they didn’t think of a second step after “chloroform Matt Striker and hold him hostage”. In that particular case, Curtis left Striker knocked out in an equipment box because Alicia Fox walked by and he was still holding chloroform, but when he couldn’t catch her, he went back and someone else had kidnapped Striker away from him, to be revealed later on to be part of Reks and Hawkins’ plot to get Regal to make them stop being janitors by blackmailing them into taking the fall, so Regal would be mad at someone else. Bateman and Kaitlyn freed Striker on accident when they found him tied up in a closet when looking for a place to make out, leading to Curtis and Maxine blaming it all on each other before Regal forced them to stay together as wrestler and manager, ensuring this by forcing them to be handcuffed together whenever Curtis doesn’t have a match.

None of this is made up.

It’s one of the strangest, most endearing, funniest, and best storylines in WWE history. It’s the best story of the 2010s that nobody talks about besides like three people I know who I know watched this nonsense along with me.

Naturally, like this season, it never concluded.

WWE found out about NXT being incredibly weird and original at some point after WrestleMania 28, and made it boring again, before any of that could reach a proper close. People were shipped off to brands, JTG and Hornswoggle got thrown onto NXT, and all of the weirdness gave way to the show become another version of WWE Superstars. Curtis, Maxine, Bateman, and Kaitlyn all sort of drifted apart, and the show just suddenly became this other thing. The closest we came to any sort of resolution was a pretty cold Bateman/Curtis match on one of the first episodes of Full Sail era NXT, and this was never about matches.

The legacy of NXT Redemption/NXT Season Five/NXT Forever Season is something like that, and like this match. It should not have worked. It was very silly, it seems almost designed to fail, but everyone involved tried their best and it succeeded, even while completely abandoning the premise of NXT as a competition, and occasionally, wrestling as a framework.

Instead, the show flowered without the burden of having to be on television and became about the concept of purgatory. Some people were trying to escape this Fallujah of professional wrestling by any means necessary. Others embraced where they were at, because you might as well, and got into the sorts of antics and romantic entanglement based storylines that I still occasionally think about today. It’s incredibly stupid, it had no point, no value, no relevancy, and it brought out the funniest and most creative sides of everyone who was willing to simply accept where they were at and have some fun.

NXT Forever Season wasn’t good, but being that it was as close as the WWE ever got to simply becoming a sitcom, it’s some of the best story work ever to come out of the WWE.

 

 

HONORABLE MENTIONS (REAL):

• PWG Seven (7/30/2010)
• NJPW Invasion Attack 2013 (4/7/2013)
• ROH War of the Worlds (5/17/2014)
• PWG Mystery Vortex III (6/26/2015)
• DG Dangerous Gate 2015 (8/16/2015)
• GCW Tournament of Survival II (6/3/2017)

For whatever reason, be it that a better version of roughly the same show idea is here (PWG show, Invasion Attack), that it is top heavy but so great that I want to acknowledge it anyways (Dangerous Gate), or simply just something really great that didn’t quite make the cut (GCW), the last six shows that failed to make the cut.

And now, your top twenty-five.

 

 

25. ROH “FINAL BATTLE 2015” (12/18/2015) ~ PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

 

The idea of the end of the decade has a way of flattening a lot of things out.

With Show of the Decade especially, when given the choice to write about yet another New Japan or PWG show here, or something on the same borderline at the start of the list, I am inclined to go with the latter.

Here, we have a show that I had I said was the tenth best of the year when it happened. While it’s still only the first of six shows from 2015 (second to 2013’s seven) on the list, in retrospect, it leapfrogs a few other shows that, at the time, I had higher on a Show of the Year list due to more consistency, but thinking about shows this decade that left a strong impression, this vaults over them when looking at these ten years from higher up in the air, and only a little bit for wrestling reasons.

ROH had something of a rocky decade, but even at their higher points, it rarely came together for a full show, but this is the closest they came to getting it completely right, as Ring of Honor ends its few year resurgence with the single best top to bottom show of that run.

The highlight, of course, being the pre-show main event as the year long Brutal Bob vs. Cheeseburger feud came to an end.

Assuming you’re normal and will skip past a Mike Elgin vs. Moose match, there isn’t a weak spot here. The Briscoes and The Young Bucks team up to hold the All Night Express’ hands through a three way spotfest. Shelley, Sabin, Sydal, and ACH assist the aging team of The Addiction through a fine six man tag. Adam Cole and Kyle O’Reilly have their best normal match ever, Roderick Strong gets something out of Bob Fish in spite of the booking of the match, Dalton Castle gets The Boys back after Silas Young failed to properly fuck the gay out of them, all capped off by AJ Styles delivering one of the great performances of his entire independent run against Jay Lethal in the main event. All of it works, and most of it feels fairly different from what comes before and after. Wild spotfests, more aggressive grudge matches, great displays of technique, and one of the better examples of the year of main event style wrestling. It’s one of the last times that an ROH show felt genuinely important, even on that smaller level.

More than any of that though, I love this show because I have a very very distinct memory in my mind of it happening and then when I saw it. It happened on the last full day I spent in Kalamazoo before graduating college the next day. I didn’t spend my last day in college watching a Ring of Honor pay-per-view obviously, but as I was passing out on my friend’s way-too-hot leather couch, with the rare pre-sleep hangover already forming, I remember looking on Twitter and seeing results of the thing, and wondering why they did that thing with Bob Fish before. A few days later, I sat down and this was the first wrestling show I watched back at home. It has a very weird feeling as a result, always existing on the edge of multiple different periods of time.

A weird and fun and really good show that lives on a few different important borders, making it a perfect start to this list.

 

 

24. PWG “ALL STAR WEEKEND 9 NIGHT ONE” (3/22/2013) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA

 

From an ending to something of a beginning.

In the first show after El Generico’s departure and the formal end of PWG’s absolute peak, the great plateau of 2013 through 2015 starts off real strongly.

It’s that same rule again. Tons upon tons of great stuff. Have two of the best matches of the year (one of the best years all decade at that) on one show, and a a lot of fun stuff underneath it, and it’s a lock. The blow off between Sami Callihan and Drake Younger was one of the matches that didn’t quite make the final cut of the Match of the Year list. The big nutty spotfest tag was one of the matches that I knew absolutely had to be included in there. So you’ve got two matches that great and a card with relatively little that was actually bad (a tag match with 2013 KOR vs. Elgin & Brian Cage exchanges is up there, and probably why this isn’t higher).

Fittingly, the ultimate Obama era indie opens its new era with a statement that defines the era at large.

PWG as the ultimate Obama-era U.S. independent offers up perhaps its most formal statement to that effect here, as even with the best days now behind PWG at this point, there’s no reason everyone still can’t have a great time before the bottom falls out.

 

 

23. WWE “NXT TAKEOVER NEW ORLEANS” (4/7/2018) ~ NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA 

 

The show of the year in a weak year, but despite what I said at the end of this year (really, I overestimated the Show of the Decade ranks, just because this wasn’t in the top ten as the absolute lock a lot of people talked it up as at the time didn’t mean it wasn’t still there), still very much among the best of the decade.

Everything on this show succeeds.

Really, that’s it.

I struggle to find a single flaw. I am in love with nothing on it, it is only (“only”) the twenty-third best wrestling show of the 2010s, but I like everything on it. The worst thing on it, in terms of match quality, is the three way tag team match, but even that succeeds relative to what its goal actually is, delivering a killer angle with the Roderick Strong heel turn and full Undisputed Era formation, on top of still being pretty good.

Beyond that, it‘s wall to wall hits.

Ember Moon and Shayna Baszler live up to the promise of their previous match, and deliver the coronation that NXT‘s new top heel deserved. On the other end of the spectrum, Andrade Almas and Aleister Black have a perfect match to deliver a crowning moment for the new champion in a second great match of a series that had no right, logically, to work as well as it did. The show is bookended by two thirty minute epics, and in the most striking statement about it all, and maybe some kind of Bowling For Soup related magic in the air in the Smoothie King center, I genuinely liked both of them. Both wildly overrated, but each thrilling and satisfying in their own light, and had Gargano/Ciampa and the ladder match had switched runtimes, the former might have wound up on the Match of the Decade shortlist itself. It’s that great.

This is not only the best show of the year and on this list too because of the absence of negatives, but because not only do the positives work as well as they do, each one being a very different sort of match serving a very different purpose, but all culminating in one of the better NXT payoffs ever.

It’s one of the ultimate versions of something that is not really for me, at least not as the exact target audience, but still one that hits so true that I cannot deny it.

 

 

22. NJPW “KIZUNA ROAD 2013 DAY NINE” (7/20/2013) ~ AKITA, JAPAN

 

2013 was the best year New Japan had all decade, and quietly, this was one of the best top to bottom New Japan shows of their banner year.

You can cite something like WRESTLE KINGDOM 11 if you would like (spoiler: not on here), but where some of those later-in-the-decade New Japan tentpole successes had big hits on top, they usually fall apart when you look deeper. Some of the best shows of those individual years, but compared the other years, not so much. I prefer a show like this, or the one that follows. Heaviness up top, to be sure, but less upsetting underneath, and in these, a much greater show of diversity.

It’s a picture perfect exhibition of what worked so well about New Japan in this 2012-2015 high golden age, which is to say not just lots of great matches, but just how much they had to offer. WWE/WWF often gets the credit as the three-ring circus, with something for everyone, but at their best, New Japan did that too, and managed to do it better than most, as these shows display.

Should you want your big moves epic title match that has a real sense of feeling and spectacle, this show has it in the second ever Shinsuke Nakamura vs. La Sombra title match, catching both men at the perfect intersections of their respective artistic peaks. If you want some shoot style grappling from Sakuraba or a pure heel vs. face grudge match or old men clubbing the hell out of each other with Ishii and Suzuki, this show has it. On top of all of it, it’s yet another classic display of the best trope that professional wrestling has, which is hurling a hot babyface (Okada) and a hot heel (Devitt) at each other for the very first time in a big match and watching the magic happen. And every single bit of it works too.

It’s a New Japan show without any one major epic, and with some lighter filler, but in which just about everything of some level of consequence delivers.

The Fully Loaded 2000 of New Japan’s peak run, which is to say a show built around specifically not delivering big matches, giving the ascendant guys a shot to shine, and which works because the entire company is on such a roll at this point that it feels like almost anything would be successful.

 

 

21. WWE “NXT TAKEOVER DALLAS” (4/1/2016) ~ DALLAS, TEXAS

 

Far from the last great Takeover, as a few spots above would indicate, but the second finest version of that idea ever.

A handful of matches, all either great (American Alpha vs. The Revival, Sami Zayn vs. Shinsuke Nakamura, Asuka vs. Bayley) or good enough to do no harm or a slight positive to the show as a whole (Barry Corbin vs. Austin Aries, Samoa Joe vs. Finn Balor). Add in a few iconic moments, like Sami Zayn’s departure from the show, and a white hot crowd. It’s pro wrestling boiled down to the basic ingredients, with enough care and attention put in to get the most out of every possible inch of the thing. All parts of the machine working in concert like that, the year’s greatest example of this specific machine working like it’s supposed to.

The ideal sort of an NXT big event, and the last one with that real old style NXT charm still remaining.

We’re not quite speaking of Takeover Brooklyn I in terms of offering the absolute 100% very best version of this thing, but as a show clearly designed as a curtain call for that era of NXT compared to Brooklyn I’s absolute high point, complete with NXT’s two greatest babyfaces passing those torches to new focal points of the brand, it’s as great of a final bow as you could ask for.

Peak NXT, one of the most fun runs of the entire decade, goes out in style.

 

 

20. WWE “NXT TAKEOVER BROOKLYN” (8/22/2015) ~ BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

 

It’s the only show that feels right to come after.

The best of the bunch, the original major hit, comes last, as NXT hits its high water mark and delivers the most purely enjoyable show in its history. To whatever extent NXT ever went out in style, this is its most stylish moment.

Usually a Takeover becomes weighed down by something over the top or unnecessary, and that’s not the case here. There’s the one highlight, of course, but virtually everything around is unceasingly fun. While the Apollo Crews debut and the Vaudevillians’ title win feel perhaps better suited for an episode of weekly TV, both have an energy and efficiency that makes them wholly bearable when assisted by the white hot crowd, and rests in between and the bigger moments and matches that the card has to offer. Jushin Liger opens the show, Samoa Joe continues his return to form in the middle, and while Owens and Balor never quite had great chemistry, and the ladder match wasn’t as great as their title switch from Japan, it’s a fun little stunt show at the end of the show. Everyone knows about the real main attraction of the show that precedes that. A monumental affair that’s both a great match and a significant and lasting (and positive) moment in wrestling history, and one of the last things in WWE history to date that feels that way, especially when you mind that parenthetical.

From start to finish, it feels like a celebration.

This weird little thing that used to be a thing for freaks on the internet, even before the WWE Network existed now in front of over ten thousand people.

One last hurrah for the old NXT as the last stories of Dusty Rhodes’ simple and charming NXT run play themselves out before someone else takes the reins, transforming it within a year into the sort of thing still capable of producing some of the best shows of the decade, as seen twice above it on this very lit, but with very little of the same spirit.

You know me, given a choice between similar things, the organic option always wins out over something less so, and every single NXT Takeover since has felt like it wanted nothing more than to be this show.

 

 

19. WWE “SMACKDOWN #745” (11/29/2013) ~ UNCASVILLE, CONNECTICUT

 

In this process, the things that stand out — the things that separate collections of great matches assembled in an artful way that I know intellectually are great from things like this — stand out a lot because I had such a great time with them. Case and point this show, which from the time of starting a shortlist for SOTD, I knew was always going to be in my top twenty-five.

The thing, the point of this all, often gets boiled down to separating emotion of the moment from the other aspects, but its never just been that. The actual point is to look back and see what still works and why it still works. The point has never once been to remove emotion from the proceedings, this is pro wrestling and all of the best wrestling has some of that in there (yes, “oh man that whips ass” is an emotion), but to separate out and look at all of the different pieces of something. Not everything I love is incredible and I don’t love a lot of objectively great things, but in the ideal scenario, I feel a certain way for something that also works perfectly on a purely mechanical level.

Here, they come together for an objectively really great and unique show, but also one that I really love with the entirety of my stupid heart.

We join our heroes on a nice Friday after Thanksgiving on Smackdown. It doesn’t matter. You’re at home, after fighting your way through a Best Buy to get a deal on a PS3, perhaps buying what you don’t know is the last ever edition of NCAA Football that will ever be released, along with GTA5. Perhaps you’ve come back to your dorm room early, realizing that you have no obligation to stick around family when you can simply hop on a Greyhound, and are lounging at your desk and watching some stuff on the television for which you rigged up a cable hook up across the ceiling to the cable hook up on your weird little tuna melt eating freak roommate’s side of the room. He’s not back yet from whatever weird stuff he and his pervert family get up to. You crank it up, crack a beer. Make a leftover sandwich. Turn on the wrestling.

The first hour is standard WWE b show stuff. You get some simple showcase matches. Titus O’Neil throws up on JBL. You know, the classics.

The magic in this is primarily in the last hour. It’s a sprawling and evolving series of three tag team matches with almost all the best guys in the company at that point (save Bryan), flowing from match to match in a novel and endearing way far more befitting ECW or golden age ROH than a WWE b-show in 2013. There’s a charm to it that WWE television usually lacks, even when they give a shit and try to make it good. Each builds on the one before it, the energy builds up, and it’s just such a fun and unique thing. It’s carried off almost exclusively by good to great wrestlers, and the whole thing simply WORKS. It’s a fascinating and memorable piece of television wrestling, and combined with being one of my favorite televised wrestling experiences ever, makes for one of the better shows of the decade. 

“Smackdown is a house show” is usually a license for people to not care about matches being good or for writers to not put anything into it, but for once, it meant that the WWE got to loosen the reigns and let people get loose and relaxed and a little goofy. This, for once, manages to capture the fun of a good house show on live television, a thing that very few other episodes ever have been able to do. One of the great examples of how good and enjoyable this dumb shit can be when you just let people breathe and work some stuff out and get out of the way.

An all-time greater than the sum of its parts total package, creating one of the great episodes of wrestling television this decade, and certainly my pure favorite.

 

18. NJPW “G1 CLIMAX 24 DAY EIGHT” (8/3/2014) ~ OSAKA, JAPAN

 

Originally slotted as the best G1 Climax of the year, it falls below the other contender upon reflection, shamefully falling to being only the second best tournament show of the year and the mere third greatest G1 show of the 2010s.

Like the previous year’s Osaka show, it is a stunning collection of hits.

The card isn’t quite as diverse as the other great match from this tournament yet to come on the list, but works in all the same ways, substituting all-around value for a higher high in the all-decade level great Shibata vs. Honma match, but still having that trademark all-around hit record, with the variety to match.

Nothing on this show exists that’s quite as universal as the 7/26 show’s Styles vs. Naito match or as grandiose or triumphant as Shibata getting Tanahashi on his second try, but I find AJ’s performance against (and around) Lance Archer to be even more impressive. Shibata/Honma is an even better Honma sprint than Ishii/Honma. Tomohiro Ishii pulls off a light miracle by getting a great one out of Davey Boy Smith Jr., while AJ Styles pulls off one of the great miracles of the decade with a really great match against Lance Archer of all people. Beyond that, Hirooki Goto and Tetsuya Naito hit another one of their classic ground doubles and in the main event, Hiroshi Tanahashi and Shinsuke Nakamura maybe don’t hit the emotional highs of July 26th’s Tanahashi/Shibata epic, but have yet another hit, and their all-time most underrated match in the process.

A quieter G1 hit, but top to bottom, one of the better G1 shows in a few year stretch of some seriously great G1 shows.

 

 

17. NJPW “G1 CLIMAX 24 DAY FOUR” (7/26/2014) ~ AKITA, JAPAN

 

The fine city of Akita does it again.

Along with two others on this list, it’s one of the ideal versions of a round robin tournament show in the history of the medium. At its best, it has to not only provide all of these great matches, but they have to be different sorts of matches, like so many of the other best shows of the decade. Great matches run in a row when they come all together, but when you when you follow up one of the great sprints of the year like Ishii/Honma with the classical strong style of Nakamura/Nagata or the classical heel/face work of AJ/Naito and Anderson/Okada followed by the super emotional meeting of Tanahashi and Shibata to end the show, that never happens, and each great match stands out in its own way.

It’s a show with one of the best matches of the year and decade on it, and if you asked the right person, you might just get two or three of three of those too.

Mostly though, like 2013’s Kizuna Road show earlier on this list that also had a really great line up that just so happened to click as perfectly as possible, it’s this sweltering atmosphere elevated by the white hot Akita crowd, away from the cities and up north out by the mountains. Secretly it’s one of the best crowds New Japan had in this entire boom period. New Japan regularly puts all-time great cards in front of them, and the crowd does their part to elevate everything just a level above. Weirdly you never heard about like Korakuen Hall or even the hot Osaka crowds for shows like this, but just like a similarly criminally undervalued show here earlier on the list, I’m here to try and tell you about it.

Akita gets what it has coming, and that’s one of the best G1 shows ever.

 

 

16. BATTLARTS “ONCE UPON A TIME ~ REMEMBER THAT TIME~” (11/5/2011) ~ TOKYO, JAPAN

 

A lot of great shows this decade represent the end of something.

The end of a particularly great run for a company, someone very special to a certain time and place saying goodbye in one way or another, or sometimes just the ending and/or the apex of one particular story.

No other truly great show is the literal end of something, let alone something this great.

BattlARTS’ final ever event is fitting farewell show to a promotion one could fairly call the greatest wrestling promotion of all time. It’s violent, it’s full of heart, and above all, there’s all so interesting and diverse. Not every match is a slam dunk like some other shows on this list, but every one of them is fun in their own way, from weirdo Kana and Keita Yano showcases on the undercard to the kind of borderline-great midcard tags with guys like Ryuji Hijikata, Takeshi Ono, Alexander Otsuka, and Ryuji Walter that were the bread and butter for so long. When things get serious, matches become a little longer and grandiose, your more heralded crossover hits like Munenori Sawa, Ikuto Hidaka, and Minoru Tanaka all step back inside these unfriendly confines for flashier displays, before the show and promotion ends the only way it could and the only way it ever should have. Daisuke Ikeda and Yuki Ishikawa deliver yet another one of their classics, managing to combine all of the company’s most positive attributes into one fifteen minute match, that for its lovely violence and spectacular realism, also carries a real weight to it as well.

The shoot style show of the decade, with all disrespect intended to just about every other pretender that’s tried to fill the void immediately left open once this show ended. Truly, there’s nothing like BattlARTS, and at the end of this show, you’ll know just why that’s such a tragedy, and why the rest of the decade (and wrestling moving forward) is worse for its absence.

It dies the way it lived, reckless and violent and charming, so much more genuine feeling and far more interesting than virtually everything else around it.

 

 

15. NJPW “KING OF PRO WRESTLING 2012” (10/8/2012) ~ TOKYO, JAPAN

 

Previously, I had written about a Kizuna Road show or a handful of G1 shows, saying that they were the ideal versions of those sorts of New Japan shows. This represents what I believe the ideal Sumo Hall major event to be, a little bigger and more grandiose than those, hitting in all of the same ways as something like maybe a more popular pick in Invasion Attack six months later in the same category.

Minimal nonsense, lots of great matches, tremendous versatility and diversity up and down the card, and an all-decade level Tanahashi IWGP Title main event epic to bring it all home at its highest point.

It just does all of that even better.

Rather than your big juniors thing being a nice prelude to an angle, this show has generational maniacs like Low Ki and Kota Ibushi wrestling for seventeen minutes with a green light, and then also a TimeSplitters tag underneath that. The silly spectacle undercard tag might not have Akebono and Bob Sapp, but Muscle Orchestra does the job. The Laughter7 tag here isn’t as great, but as their first one upon return, it isn’t trying to be. On the upper half, there’s no miracle as impressive as the Nakamura/Davey Jr. match, instead opting for the safe hit of Nakamura vs. Goto, but it also loses a Rob Conway NWA Title match and slides in another great Okada vs. Karl Anderson match (if you came to see Machinegunka after he left Japan, that may sound like a bit, but I assure you, I mean it, especially in 2012) third from the top in its place. At the very end, the arguable best Tanahashi vs. Okada match even gets an upgrade, slotting Minoru Suzuki instead for arguably the best New Japan match of the entire decade.

Genuinely, the show feels like a triumph, this big crowning moment in the company’s big year of rebirth, lining up everything it has to offer, showing it off, and managing to throw enough hooks out there for successive big events to come in the next six months.

Not the perfect big New Japan show, but outside of a Dome level supercard, everything it can be and ought to aspire towards.

 

 

14. PWG “BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES 2015 STAGE TWO” (8/29/2015) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA

 

Like ROH’s Final Battle a few months later in the same year, it feels like something of an ending, at least in spirit.

The final hurrah and last major resounding success of this sort of thing, showing why even if not what it was at the peak two to four years earlier, the absence of these sorts of shows was such a loss to begin with.

While lacking the one big epic that MYSTERY VORTEX III and FROM OUT OF NOWHERE had with the Roderick Strong title matches or something like the Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Chris Hero on MV3, all entries on an initial Match of the Decade shortlist, it’s a better and more interesting top to bottom show than either. Its The more heavily praised tag of the show fails to hold up, but the main event is still an absolute god damner in spite of its flaws, and the show also holds another one of PWG’s best matches of the year in Chris Hero vs. Timothy Thatcher. If not as wildly impressive now as it was at the time, losing ground in the way some of the wrestling on this show always does, it’s still one of the more well rounded U.S. independent shows of the era, offering up brawls, spotfests, grapplefuck, and even a little classic big/little underdog wrestling in equal measure. Once again, they get the escalation just right, ending with the wildest thing they’ve run all year, on the biggest weekend of the year.

One of the better expressions of the three-ring circus ideal in recent memory.

The last really really great PWG show.

 

13. NJPW “G1 CLIMAX 23 DAY FOUR” (8/4/2013) ~ OSAKA, JAPAN

 

The original hit in Osaka.

A famous one that I think everyone knew about.

2013 saw New Japan put on many ideal versions of a certain kind of show, and this beautiful night in Osaka stands above he rest, this time with a near perfect display of tournament style wrestling, back before the format was ruined by the money people. There are six different great matches on this show, two of them among the top twenty five of the year and overall best of the decade, and they’re all pretty different. Pure formula good guy against bad guy, traditional power fighting, technique vs. flying in Nakamura vs. Ibushi, and one of the quintessential dudes rock style meathead displays of the decade in the show that this is maybe now best known for, for great reason.

This is the sort of show every round robin tournament show should strive to resemble, not only offering up a gigantic slab of stellar wrestling, but one as diverse as it is great. I wrote that about the other G1 shows on this list, and in general, it is a hallmark of all the best wrestling shows, but it’s as true here as ever. There is so much here, and not only is so much of it great, but so much of it is great in so many different ways.

Given the lasting impact both in terms of what these major matches did for the people like Tomohiro Ishii and Kota Ibushi who had them, let alone the reputations of the bigger star and their combined impact on the overall style of wrestling, this show’s not just here for match quality either though.

August 4th in Osaka sees the greatest G1 show of the decade, and while the true and correct format for this tournament would be abandoned two years later, still a road map as clear and concise over a decade later as it was the day it was first drawn up.

 

 

12. NJPW “WRESTLE KINGDOM X” (1/4/2016) ~ TOKYO, JAPAN

 

An obviously great show.

Nothing on this is bad, the highs are among the highest anywhere in wrestling, and there’s a level of importance unmatched by any other full show anywhere in professional wrestling in 2016, and very few all decade.

If I decided to go through every single thing on this show that was great, I would describe virtually the entire show. Jay Lethal vs. Michael Elgin escapes that category, but otherwise, it’s all great. There are the big hits, of course, but every smaller hit lands as well. More importantly, they all land in different ways. Junior tag spotfests, heavyweight slugfests like Ishii/Shibata, major moments for ascendant stars like KUSHIDA, easy classic formula work like another easy Naito/Goto hit, big stadium spectacles like Nakamura/Styles, and in the main event, one of the more emotional title match main events in recent history.

Yet again, it is a stellar variety act.

Beyond just outright quality, this is also a pretty important event. Not only in the history of New Japan, but I think in the history of wrestling as a whole, and very clearly a demarcation line between one era and the next. In as much as 2016 seemed to be about a new (worse) era falling into place, this is the show that most feels like either the firm end of one era, the beginning of another, or some combination of both.

Canonically, the last wrestling show of 2015, which might explain why it’s so much better than every other show that happened this year.

 

 

11. PWG “MYSTERY VORTEX” (12/1/2012) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA

 

The other PWG shows on this list are major events. It’s not to say this is some shocker if you look at it on paper, but the other best-of-the-decade events from PWG are major tournaments or these moments of obvious emotional catharsis, usually with one of the obvious great matches of the year or, more removed now, one of the best matches of the decade. The inaugural MYSTERY VORTEX show has none of that.

It just all works out perfectly.

What it does have over so many of those shows is how little fat there is on it.

Beyond the one obviously awful thing (that you should skip anyways as nobody reading this is watching an (alleged) serial rapist youtube shooter), PWG shakes off something of a funk that they were in at points in 2012 and puts on one of the best shows in company history, kind of just by hurling stuff out there. Roderick Strong and Eddie Edwards find each other as perfect partners, so great at the start of their one single year together that they were a lock for the TAG TEAM OF THE DECADE shortlist, and give two others on that list their best non-gimmick matches of 2012. If you can stomach it, Sami Callihan and Drake Younger start their famous trilogy with an obscenely brutal normal match that is, in no small part, at least a little responsible for how things ultimately ended up. El Generico has one last singles match in the American Legion in a classic Generico style showcase against a young Rich Swann, and in the main event, Kevin Steen puts forth one of his career babyface performances, totally and completely making young Adam Cole as a top heel.

This is still PWG, everything on the show is a totally nutty display of really cool ideas and sick moves, but they’re all wild in very different ways. Your flying nonsense, your hitting nonsense, different levels, intensities, and flavors of your hardcore nonsense. The key isn’t necessarily restraint, it never was, the real thing is that that almost every match is trying something different, and very little lasts so long that you ever have a chance to get too much and lose the novelty.

More than anything else, that’s the lesson of Peak PWG, and aside from a few other shows with similar strengths and even higher highs, this is one of the great examples of Peak PWG that there’s ever been.

It’s one of the most impressive PWG shows ever, because unlike other special occasions where everything is planned, plotted out, and assembled just right, this is achieved far more casually. As always, I am far more moved and impressed by these shows of power and ability than by the others, the ability to still achieve on this level with something that feels far more organic. A more normal show that just so happens to become great despite its lower ambitions, as a result of pure talent and circumstance, compared to the shows that feel pre-ordained as Great Wrestling Shows.

There are times it maybe runs at a higher level or produces more spectacular products, but movement for movement, there may be no greater look at just what this machine was capable of than MYSTERY VORTEX.

 

 

10. TENRYU PROJECT “TENRYU RETIREMENT ~ REVOLUTION ROAD FINAL” (11/15/2015) ~ TOKYO, JAPAN

 

The retirement of an all-time great allows for the single weirdest Sumo Hall show of the decade, and it is one of a kind.

With respect to the oddball cards All Japan will put on in their attempts to encapsulate this same energy in 2016 and 2017 (both very fun shows in their own respects) and maybe like the ALL TOGETHER shows, nothing else is like this. Sanshiro Takagi and Kikutaro on opposite sides of the ring is followed by a Sendai Girls offer tag, which is followed by one of the scummiest and grimiest dirt indie ten man tags ever to get on a show like this, which also has Jushin Liger as a co-star. Jun Kasai wrestles The Great Kabuki. Another dirt indie team of kickers assembles to try and fuck up a dream juniors team of Nakajima, Hikaru Sato, and K-Hash. Not one but TWO of the most delightful matches of the year happen, and then there’s Tenryu’s retirement itself, which is an entire god damned spectacle.

Overall, it’s an exceedingly good time. It has that over a lot of shows with higher highs, how much fun it was to watch as a live experience while having a few beers and watching in a poor quality livestream with a few hundred other true psychopaths. That’s what wrestling’s about.

If not the best show of the year about saying goodbye to a lovable shitkicker, certainly the most all around FUN show of the one of the best years in wrestling, and the dudes rock show of the decade.

 

 

9. WWE “SUMMERSLAM 2013” (8/18/2013) ~ LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

 

Another one that is more than just a collection of great matches (with the mediocrities or less minimized in a way they often are not from this company).

The matches are really really great though.

Christian once again gets more out of Del Rio than virtually anyone else. The mixed tag team match is really fun. CM Punk and Brock Lesnar get together and have one of the greatest matches of its kind ever. And while it doesn’t quite match up to the encounter they had on an episode of Raw the year prior, and certainly wasn’t as well executed bell to bell as it was built up to or as it was followed up on (accidentally or not), it feels impossible to say that John Cena vs. Daniel Bryan failed to deliver, even if you’re someone like me who only got something out of it on a purely emotional level because of the last three seconds of the match. Following the match, the WWE ran one of its most important angles of the entire decade. Perhaps not one with the planned long terms significance of something like a stable break up angle from 2014 or Stephanie McMahon giving women the right to vote in 2015, but the start of something that the WWE brought on themselves and tried and failed to ever truly reckon with, as the company itself turns heel, only once Cena has finally anointed a successor in 100% clean fashion. If the Summer of Punk was the first squeeze of the toothpaste out of the tube, then what began here was the careful process of rolling the tube up and making sure all of it’s out, before hilariously trying to rush it all back inside.

Stepping outside of objective quality again, there’s that personal sort of element at play based on my experience watching this show, and just how it is that I actually watched this show

By 2013, streaming technology had advanced to a point that I rarely had to worry all that much about how I would see something as it happened. Long gone were the days of 144p streams of WWE Judgment Day 2006. Long gone were the days of a choppy stream of TNA Bound For Glory 2009, watched while immobile on a couch after an asthma attack in the most terrifying health related incident of my life to that point. However, my laptop broke the Friday before this show and a week before going back to college, I was not in the mood to go out and do something else either. So, come Sunday night and my new laptop not having arrived quite yet, the choices were either wait days and fill my Sunday night through channel hopping and waiting for Breaking Bad or to pony up the $50 and to watch the stream of the show on my phone.

It’s one of the best built up and best executed double main events in WWE history, and the thought of not seeing this as it happened, of having to wait days or even weeks to see it was unbearable to me in that exact moment.

So, I put up the $50.

I watched this show on this tiny screen on an iPhone I had bought in 2012. I kept moving it around because it was too early to lie in bed with the sun not having even set when the show began, but then it felt weird putting it propped on my desk where a full laptop used to be only days earlier . Eventually, I just settled for lying on the couch on my side and propping it up on the coffee table against some books. I had to restart the file every so often or reload the website or deal with buffering, but at no point did the thought cross my mind that I can just wait. It wasn’t just that I paid $50 for it and was going to get my money’s worth, it was just impossible to turn away from. 

I could never imagine myself doing this now, paying $50 to watch any wrestling show ever again. The WWE Network and streaming boom outside of wrestling around the same time changed everything, not just in that the price marker was lowered significantly and streaming was centralized and largely improved, but also in the fact that no real promotion could credibly ever again have to really ask anyone to pay $50 again. The result is a slow shift towards making cards that would ever implore someone to do such a thing. Most of the shows you get now feel like they’re assembled with an attitude that screams, “Here, shut up and eat your fucking lop”. This is one of the last of its kind, a genuinely major WWE show assembled with more than one or two interesting things going on, with some real momentum, and with a top to bottom card that might not always be great, but is never truly boring. It’s one of the best examples of a major wrestling show put together in America all decade. A real happening that demanded to be experienced in the moment. No matter the system of delivery and no matter the price. It’s the highest compliment, a pre-Network WWE show worth every cent of its asking price.

I didn’t regret it at the time, no matter how bad my eyes felt or sore my neck was from that shitty old couch with barely any armrest cushioning. A decade later, I still don’t.

The near-ideal scenario, an all-around great show that delivers one of the best of the decade on top of overall consistency, (accidentally) doing something interesting, while also being something that, having very little to do with the show itself, that I’m always going to remember fondly.

 

 

8. CHIKARA “HIGH NOON” (11/13/2011) ~ PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

 

HIGH NOON, the first ever live broadcast event in company history, happened to be the most important show in CHIKARA history, and they clearly knew it.

Everything that matters in the company gets a major stage, all leading to the most important match and then arguably the singular greatest moment in company history. Not everything is spectacular, not every match is one for a spreadsheet or traditionally perfect, but everything delivers as much as it possibly could, even resulting in wrestlers who I have no great affection for like like Ares and Tim Donst being involved in chunks of pro wrestling that I would call great, and less practiced wrestlers like a Tursas or a young Green Ant delivering on major moments.

The sole major CHIKARA act available that lacks some large scale character moment or blowoff match to have showcased — The Colony —  instead faces the top tag team on the independents in the Young Bucks in one of the great bullshit stunt shows of its time and place, and might have stolen the entire show if the main event wasn’t one of the most emotional, overwhelming, and cathartic matches that the company ever put on. As for that main event, that one’s for another list entirely, and it sure doesn’t come at the start of that list. To keep it short here, it’s the sort of match that takes a really good show, and turns it into one of the best of the decade, offering up the rare show here that delivers as an all around product, before also sticking the landing perfectly, which once upon a time, was the hallmark of the promotion itself.

To whatever extent such a thing is possible or exists anymore following all that’s come out, there is no better expression of the charm of CHIKARA at a certain point in time, even arguably post-peak as it was, than High Noon.

CHIKARA would live another year and a half before dying (and some claim it even came back in 2014), but effectively, this was the series finale, and it’s up there with the other great endings ever.

 

 

7. PWG “FEAR” (12/10/2011) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA

 

No other poster or advertisement or graphic for a wrestling show all decade gets me quite like what PWG conjured up for FEAR.

I often make the mistake of considering many of my experiences or feelings universal, and so I recognize that originally assuming when writing 2011 A YEAR IN LISTS, suggesting that the image alone ought to make the case for this show as one of the year’s best was maybe a mistake. However, few images in wrestling all decade transport me back to such a specific time and/or place as this.

The show itself is also really really great.

Along the same lines as CHIKARA’s HIGH NOON only weeks before totally encapsulated the company’s entire approach and feeling at the time & at its peak all decade, this show does the same for PWG. There are better PWG shows yet to come on the list, but those are big tournament shows with a lot more behind them, where as this is just an exceptional version of a PWG show. It’s got some weird stuff, it has some only-in-Reseda style dream matches like Roderick Strong vs. the Amazing Red or El Generico vs. Dick Togo, (an uncomfortable match built like one-third around a groping act but then two-thirds around some fun young guys throwing out every spot they can think of), and a fun surprise or two like the brief return of Chris Hero during a contractual delay. Most importantly, like HIGH NOON as well, it’s a show elevated even further by having one of the great matches of the entire decade at the very end, one that goes above and beyond any expectation, and which delivers the company’s own long awaited emotional catharsis as the most annoying people in the world get beaten up by two of the coolest.

FEAR isn’t perfect, but if I had to pick one show to explain it all to somebody, this might just be the one.

It is not the best PWG show of the 2010s, nor is it even the best PWG show of 2011, but it is the most PWG show of its peak.

 

 

6. BEYOND WRESTLING “GREATEST RIVALS ROUND ROBIN” (9/26/2015) ~ PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

 

This song’s called “Bro Hymn”.

Fittingly, Biff Busick’s final show with Beyond Wrestling, sans retirement run, ends with their first and greatest Ace taking them to the promised land, even if like Sara Del Rey for womens wrestling and Moses for the, uh, the actual promised land, he wasn’t allowed to walk through those doors himself. From here on in and for something like four years running, almost every single Beyond Wrestling show had something on it that made the company a mandatory watch.

Like 2013’s Show of the Year, PWG DDT4 2013, the company turns the show entirely over to its departing all-time great babyface.

My immediate instinct is that this is the show of the year. It’s a one of a kind experience and the host to some of my favorite independent wrestling of the decade. It’s a show entirely devoted to someone in Biff Busick who isn’t just one of my favorite wrestlers ever but also pretty important to me as a fan as well. I would love it if this was the show of the year in the same vein as El Generico’s farewell in 2013.

Unlike the 2013 show of the year though, a show higher up the end of the decade charts than this, there’s too much other stuff outside of the round robin. The moments in between those matches are weighed down just enough by a few real turds, like one of the most canceled-in-retrospect matches of all time (go find the card) and a Ricochet vs. JT Dunn match, and as such doesn’t feel quite right as the absolute number one best professional wrestling show of the year. However, the rest of this show and the series that gives it its name is truly superb, and one of the best things in wrestling in a very very loaded year. The greatest testament to the four man round robin series that anchors the show is that every single bit of it rules. Not one or two matches, but all six of them. Each is great in a unique and different way, even the surprisingly short Gulak vs. Thatcher match that preceded the main event itself, intent on standing out in its own way while not even trying to compare to Biff Busick’s final match.

While the other members of the round robin Timothy Thatcher, Eddie Edwards, and Drew Gulak all did great work, this show is about Biff, and he runs through it one last time. An even display of grapplefuck fundamentals against his oldest rival Drew Gulak, displaying why that rivalry traveled as far as it did and lasted as long as it did, with the sort of charmingly hard-nosed display that planted the seeds for the style all over the country. The match with Thatcher is great enough that we’ll discuss it later, even if it’s not the best Biff/Thatcher match of 2015. Suffice to say, it’s a beautiful match that’s both a fitting end for the time being and a look at all they still could have done. The final match against Eddie Edwards was the least of the three Busick matches on the show, but an appropriate send off all the same.

Most crucial to the success of this show is that there was never any attempt to do the usual thing when someone leaves. Put someone else over, do the whole thing.

The great appeal of Beyond Wrestling in these years was that, after I found Biff Busick and he swiftly became one of my favorites, it was the one place that seemed to see just how great he could be as more than an antagonistically leaning Good Match Guy. Busick helped spark a return to a style that I and others found so appealing because of the lack of artifice it put into the world and how it was both realer feeling and more satisfying than the other types of wrestling. By staying true to its roots, and allowing Busick to whip everybody’s ass just one more time, Busick gets to leave the way he spent his time, free from nonsense and wrestling matches that felt realer, and most importantly, matches that were more satisfying than everything else around it.

Biff gets to be the big god damned hero one last time, and it feels better than just about everything else.

 

 

5. PWG “DDT4 2013” (1/12/2013) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA

 

And now, the end is near. 

It’s another ending, but this one hits the hardest yet.

Not to be simply content with yet another great show that also has a great moment, one of many Peak PWG shows on this list, PWG instead, as the Obama era indie company, begins his second term by saying goodbye to its heart and soul and arguably the greatest wrestler in its history, as El Generico says goodbye.

In losing its greatest babyface, most consistent wrestler, and independent wrestling’s all-time emotional center, the golden age of PWG is over. I used to be the type of guy who would have extended it to Kevin Steen leaving in 2014 or even the great run of shows again through 2015 before the bottom really fell out. But watching PWG through 2013, it becomes obvious. The increase on worse wrestlers than before didn’t help matters, but without this heart and soul, a certain quality was missing. It’s not through any fault of the company’s either. El Generico was irreplaceable. A show like this does as much as one show ever can to showing off such a thing and expressing that out to the world. Wrestling is at its best when it makes no pretenses and tells no lies, and to try and deny how special El Generico was would be a lie.

In the choice to embrace that truth instead, PWG has one of its finest hours.

In a move that elevates this to its position, the entire show becomes devoted to El Generico instead of simply one match, as he and Kevin Steen enter the annual DDT4 tournament for the PWG Tag Team Titles. The story of the tournament becomes the story of this already well-explored relationship, as they go from wanting nothing to do with each other, to begrudgingly teaming, to being fully reunited for their last ever match as a tag team in the finals. Beyond the tears, the entire show is nearly full of great matches. Some are the big epics you expect, the stuntshows you tune in to see, but Sami Callihan and Drae Younger also pop into the middle of the show and deliver a vulgar display of brutality to re-set everyone with something completely different. After them comes the storm, and the show ends with not only one of the best matches of the year, but one of the defining matches and moments of the era and one of the most memorable of the decade.

Beyond that emotional exhaustion, before any of the feeling goes into it, it’s a near perfect wrestling show. It’s violent, it’s fun, it’s such a diverse card relatively speaking, you have a handful of real gems, there’s a complete arc through the whole thing, and it ends with as endearing and heartwarming a display as professional wrestling can ever really give you. It’s everything wrestling can be at its best. Varied and interesting and cool and just undeniably and overwhelmingly real.

A match that’s more than a match will almost always win MOTY or more. A wrestler who is more than a wrestler will almost always win WOTY or more. A show that is more than a show is going to win Show of the Year, and be among the best anywhere in the genre all decade, because even more so than those difficult feats, it’s very very hard to do that. This one did though.

This isn’t just a show, it’s a love letter, and it’s the kind you never really let go of.

 

 

4. PWG “BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES 2011” (8/20/2011) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA

 

Secretly, something that always felt like one of the most important shows of the decade.

It’s the arrival of Peak PWG.

The previous shows in 2011 all feel like a matter of getting certain ducks in a row (Kevin Steen becoming a hero in his own right while still in opposition to #1 hero El Generico, The Young Bucks becoming The Young Bucks, Hero and Claudio passing the torch), and this show is both a formal declaration of what the most important independent in the country is and an official passing of the torch from one era to the next. It’s not just that Claudio puts El Generico over for the first time, four years in the making, or that Chris Hero’s bully formula pays off in a big way to give Willie Mack THE RUB, or that Hero and Claudio also put the Young Bucks over in addition to that. It’s not even that the show ends with the first BOLA final yet without a major star from a previous generation there to steady the boat.

It’s that all of that happens in the span of three hours.

Beyond that, it’s an incredible show.

This was top to bottom great as a more celebrated show a month earlier, with less weight carried solely by the main event, because of something like the performance of Fit Finlay or how great Castagnoli/Generico and Hero/Mack in the first rounds were. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if the main event didn’t deliver, or was simply a great little match. Instead, it’s a pocket epic that this list is going to come back to a little bit later on, as the two new heads of the scene take the most interesting route, and deliver a bottle episode, resulting in their best ever match together to that point.

On average, the best pure wrestling show of the year. Beyond that, the most important independent wrestling show of the year, the era, and the entire decade.

A guide book to the next eight years and four months, in all ways positive and negative.

 

 

3. WWE “MONEY IN THE BANK 2011” (7/17/2011) ~ ROSEMONT, ILLINOIS

 

Not the best on-paper or on-spreadheet show of 2011, but when I talked about some things being flattened out by the longer view, this is what I meant. Not as great on paper, not the same level of top to bottom great wrestling, but when talking about shows of the decade, you know, shit, the “of the decade” part stands out.

When talking about the show of the decade, how can it not be the higher one?

This is the show that formed wrestling in the 2010s, at least on a mainsteam level.

Not just the main event — although, yes — but the entire thing. A focus around the rise of two all-time great independent legends to the near-top of a larger promotion, the beginning of the weaponization of fan discontent

Calling it the IYH: Canadian Stampede of the 2010s is perhaps an insult to how well rounded and efficient that show was, because this is still a 2010s WWE PPV, but it is a phenomenal achievement. It is not QUITE the best live wrestling show experience (emphasis on show, the main event itself is clear and away number one) I’ve ever had, because independent wrestling is inherently better than going to the circus, but an incredible experience all the same. It’d be a lie to say there are NO weak points on the card, but they’re so minor compared to everything that this show gets right.

The big thing here — like the other major successes of the year, a real 2011 ass thing — is that the main event, one of the best matches of the decade, does a lot of heavy lifting. Like those other matches at the end of these shows, there will be time in later pieces to talk about them in much greater detail, but suffice to say, it’s the most powerful example yet of a show that lays a stellar foundation for the major attraction to then make the show something truly special, not only in terms of the year or the decade overall, but in terms of wrestling history, period.

Beyond simply having the best match of 2011 and the defining match of the entire era and maybe decade on it, there’s so many different sorts of things on this show. The ladder matches are different, offering up slightly different versions of classic fed bullshit done well with wildly different sorts of results, there’s a really really smartly booked heel victory by Christian (that also happens to come at the end of a really great match against Randy Orton too) that people have justifiably remembered ever since, and one of the most fun Big Guy Fights of the era too between The Big Show and Mark Henry. It really does have just about everything, at least in terms of the sorts of things that a company like the WWE is going to offer you.

WWE is still the circus, but for once, that’s not an insult, because all three rings ruled.

Beyond that variety, and that variety hitting like it doesn’t usually have the ability to do, this did something that only one other WWE show this decade was able to do, which is leave me with an actual sense of hope and excitement for the future, which doubled with that live feeling — equal parts coup d’état and college football rivalry game, a version of The Game where the very concept of Ohio State is repudiated and all of their players bail on a play when it’s tied late in the 4th and put on maize and blue instead — resulted in something truly unforgettable.

 

 

2. NJPW “WRESTLE KINGDOM IX” (1/4/2015) ~ TOKYO, JAPAN

 

With the Global Force U.S. pay-per-view distribution forcing them to keep the show at a reasonable length, New Japan does it again and maybe better than ever.

It’s not a show that I’m exactly head over heels in love with, perhaps being too obvious and untouchable to form any real strong relationship with, but it’s so great. Like New Japan Pro Wrestling being the best promotion in the world in 2014, it’s another example of the advantage of being the incumbent. Nobody did enough to knock them or this show off the pedestal, each other contender being marred by some other weakness that was either absent from this show or put into a far less harmful role than the less-than-stellar offerings that this show had.

While not a perfect show top to bottom — very few wrestling shows ever are — with one exception (the Omega/Taguchi bomb of a match that made people think Omega was a bad junior when every other title match he had in 2015 was good) what isn’t great is either fun or very short. The NOAH vs. Suzuki-gun tag isn’t especially long despite not being great, and while in the same boat, few things in wrestling were as fun as seeing Tomoaki Honma vs. Jeff Jarrett at points in a six man tag team match. The great matches themselves put forth another great example of versatility on a major wrestling show, offering up dumb meathead wrestling (Makabe/Ishii), something more legitimate feeling and shoot-adjacent (Sakuraba/Suzuki), spottier juniors wrestling (the four way tag), and one genuine feel good moment (Shibata and Goto winning the titles). When the show got serious, all of that held up just as well. Nakamura and Ibushi had an absolute god damner in the semi-main event — a genuine Encounter — and the show wrapped itself up with yet another great Tanahashi vs. Okada match.

The show ended with perhaps the emotional high point of New Japan in the 2010s, Hiroshi Tanahashi gleefully playing air guitar while Kazuchika Okada retreated in actual tears over his loss, with some remarkably boring people being very Mad Online about — get this — Okada losing, while a few of us (myself obviously included, Go Ace) got to gloat for the next year.

It rarely gets better than that.

 

 

1. WWE “WRESTLEMANIA XXX” (4/6/2014) ~ NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

 

Except when it does.

For those reading this for a while, or for a rarer few who have talked to me for years, this ought not to come as any real surprise. It’s the only show I’ve ever written about in full (willingly) for positive reasons. It’s one of my favorite wrestling shows of all time, and for what it maybe lacks compared with shows with higher highs or less bullshit, it makes up for in other areas.

You can argue that there are better wrestling shows this decade, and fair enough, look at the rest of the top five, but I do not believe that there is a truly great show more of this decade than this.

Perhaps not the best show of the decade, but clearly to me, the Show of the Decade.

It’s the series finale of the WWE and while it’s not exactly wall to wall bangers, it’s one of the best structured shows in company history.

This is a show largely built around one show-long story and bookended by the beginning and end of it. That’s not all this is though. From the seeming write-off to the Attitude Era to the best pure battle royal in like a million years in either direction to a surprisingly great John Cena vs. Bray Wyatt spectacle match, it’s not all the Daniel Bryan stuff. However, holy shit, the Daniel Bryan stuff. The first Bryan match of the night is one of the best of the night and one of his most impressive soft carryjobs of all time. The second Bryan match of the night is one of the single most triumphant moments in wrestling history. Some of the most dramatic nearfalls of the decade, one of the most iconic images of the decade, and a perfect close to — in my opinion — the best storyline ever in company history. And it might not be the most memorable thing on the show either! The ending of The Streak didn’t result in a great match, but as a moment, it’s even more powerful. You want to say it’s the most memorable moment in pro wrestling all decade? Sure! Fine!

It’s the rare time in which WWE doesn’t chicken out and offers a bunch of different major moments in the same show, on top of delivering a handful of great matches. In fact, virtually every match on this show succeeds on one level or the other, either a great match or a major moment (save the women’s clusterfuck, which receives so little time and attention that it may as well not have ever happened). I can’t think of a single one in 2014 that even comes close to the mix of classic matches and classic moments that this had, and as such, no show ever even came close to unseating this.

Of course almost none of it mattered, every step forward in WWE is always followed by a hundred back, but in the moment, it’s the most uplifting show they’ve held in well over a decade. Beyond that, it’s one of the most celebratory wrestling shows of all time. Once the opening match happens, the entire show feels like a victory parade for a new era, and even if we didn’t get it after this night, we still got this night, and I’ve never ever felt such a sense of hope like I did during this show. Even if it was stupid of me to think that, even if none of it MATTERED, it still happened, and that can’t be taken away from it. The high water mark, the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I wrote a few thousand words on it as an entire show a few years back, I’m real happy with it. You can read that for more detail, like my weird college roommate who only ate Subway tuna melts or whatever else. As it is, it’s one of my favorite shows of all time, one of the non-live in person pro wrestling viewing experiences I’m most likely to hold onto for the rest of my life, and nothing else comes close. The skeleton key here, at the end of everything, is that when it came time to decide, and I had to consider one wrestling show from the entire decade, the very first thing that came to mind was the best to ever do it, standing on top of the world with both titles, amid a sea of pyrotechnics, celebrating one of the best feeling victories in the history of the medium.

Professional wrestling is a visual medium as much as anything else, and sometimes, it comes down to the image in your head, how it made you feel, and the inability of any number of Great Matches or intellectual supercards to knock that off its perch. It is my list, and at the end of it, while there are other choices I will not argue with, no logical nor emotional argument can dissuade me.

The best professional wrestling show of the decade is, problems and minor annoyances and all, I feel, the ultimate victory of the last ten plus years.

 

 

 

 

 

TAG TEAM OF THE DECADE:

 

So, tag teams.

The thing with tag teams in this decade is that it is not what it was. Try and count down tag teams in the 2000s, and while maybe you have a clear winner (I do), there are maybe three to five other contenders, and in the 2010s, I feel as though it‘s pretty obvious, with maybe one or two teams you could (but most likely would not) make a case for. 

In terms of what I tend to look for — a combination of longevity and high peaks, to say nothing of things like versatility in any format — there were maybe five teams that hit on every aspect of that.

You have a few teams with a lot of longevity but real peaks and valleys like your longer tenured WWE ones (Usos, New Day, Revival), or people in similar situations where you have the longevity but not as many highs as you maybe ought to for all that time together. You also have a lot of teams with high peak, but very short runs. That’s the majority of the list. Your Rhodes Brothers, Kings of Wrestling, whoever else you immediately think of so I don’t spoil anything else. Teams who maybe were only together for a year, maybe two, but had enormously high highs and were among the best teams in the world for their entire run.

It’s not an easy award to put together. Less so in the way WOTD/MOTD will be where it feels impossible to make the last round of cuts, but moreso because the last ten or so spots here are all fairly up in the air, and you can make an argument for a few other teams too. So, for the teams that either had far more great multi-man work than tag work or just didn’t do quite enough, or lack one real major hit, here are your Honorable Mentions for the best tag team of the 2010s.

 

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

• Jimmy Susumu & Jimmy Kagetora
• Meiyu Tag (Hirooki Goto & Katsuyori Shibata)
• Roppongi Vice
• Shingo Takagi & Akira Tozawa
• SMOP (Akebono & Ryota Hama)
• T-Hawk & Eita

 

 

 

25. SUPER SMASH BROTHERS (PLAYER UNO & PLAYER DOS/STU GRAYSON)

PREVIOUS: 3 (2012)

 

We start off with a somewhat interesting case.

The Super Smash Bros never really stopped teaming this decade. You have your Evil Uno runs in PWG around the middle of the decade, but they would pop up in the early days of AEW at the very end of the decade and the Dark Order would (regrettably) be all over that. The problem is that due to some visa issues in early 2013, they were largely confined to Canada for the majority of the decade, and save a few special return matches against the Young Bucks in those years, they were more often than not facing teams not capable of helping them deliver great matches, and so that longevity doesn’t amount to all that it really could have.

However, considering those three years at the start of the decade in the U.S. — working regularly for PWG and CHIKARA at different points, an under the radar DGUSA/EVOLVE run, and even impressing as ROH television enhancement guys for KOW and the American Wolves in 2010 — the case is still really really good, relative to the competition. The run isn’t three years of perfection, there are a fair amount of misses, the style was never my favorite, and the SSB tended to always be the sort of team that could be in a ton of great matches, but were never the best team in a great match, but the hits are hard to deny. There’s too much that I liked, and too much that I liked for too long.

It helps a lot too that their peak — that 2012 PWG run — features arguably they best stunt show of the decade in the famous ladder match against the Young Bucks and Future Shock. If you’re going to have a case reliant on a big peak, it helps to have it be one this high up.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. The Kings of Wrestling, ROH (9/27/2010)
• vs. Future Shock, PWG (4/21/2012)
• vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (5/25/2012)
• vs. The Young Bucks vs. Future Shock, PWG (7/21/2012)
• vs. Inner City Machine Guns (Ricochet/Rich Swann), DGUSA (11/3/2012)
• vs. Dojo Bros, PWG (12/1/2012)

 

 

24. THE AMERICAN WOLVES (DAVEY RICHARDS & EDDIE EDWARDS)

 

Likewise, another team that is for sure not my favorite, but that relative to the field, I cannot really deny.

The Wolves’ big heyday was, of course, 2009 when they had the big prestige ass ballot stuffing run in Ring of Honor, so technically, all of their work this decade is past their prime. However, Eddie Edwards became a good wrestler in 2010, and so all of their work in the 2010s had an advantage that none of those matches had (helpfully also, at no point in the 2010s were they asked to work a 45:00 draw against a Tyler Black team on it, Bryan Danielson or no Bryan Danielson).

While taking a break for about a year and a half due to ROH booking in 2011 & 2012 meant they didn’t actually have a full six or so years together before Davey Richards’ body began to give out on him, there’s enough here that their maybe three or four year together is enough.

The great matches are obviously there.

More importantly, there’s a surprising versatility case. It’s not to say there is an American Wolves match for everyone, some people are never going to be won over for one reason or another, but there are a lot of different kinds of American Wolves matches. As heels in ROH in 2010, a main event babyface super team in 2011 ROH, the gatekeeper team in 2013 (and also in a guest spot in SMASH years later against Busick and Gulak), then doing a lot of that all over again in TNA. It’s that run that really puts them here, even if I like the highs of the ROH run (a Kings of Wrestling match that I think would be met with critical acclaim if more than like fifty people outside of the building ever saw it) a little more. In between being the glue that held the 2014 nostalgia series against the Hardys and Team 3D together and a surprisingly good Best of Five Series against a past-their-primes Austin Aries and Bobby Roode the next year, the run showed a previously unseen strength in the ability to be the babyface anchors of a division, not only being good, but also being the sort of team you want to see succeed.

Eddie and Davey are cursed, in some regards, being outdone by other teams at the things they did best. They were great in TNA, but clearly the second best division anchor all decade behind the Machine Guns. They were great as a multi-faceted ROH great match tag team, but also not on the level of the Briscoes, Buck, or the Kings of Wrestling.

Still, there‘s so much to like, I think. 

A surprising amount of longevity, some surprising and impressive higher points (the only teams to be in better Hardys matches this decade were, no spoiler but also probably no shocker, two top-five teams on this list), and an equally impressive versatility case. They‘re only at spot number twenty-four, but the Wolves were a late addition to the shortlist when some others didn’t feel quite right to me, and to my surprise, Davey and Eddie just kind of did, making them one of the surprises of the list so far. 

Most of all, Davey Richards got to live out his dream and not only see Beer Money reunited, but even got to wrestle them.

All that being said, if the other Eddie Edwards team on this list had the chances and/or longevity that the Wolves did, they might have been the Tag Team of the Decade period, so all of that praise is tempered by the fact that a very similar team had a much better run with maybe a fifth of the time together.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Switchblade Conspiracy, WXW (3/13/2010)
• vs. The Kings of Wrestling, ROH (5/6/2011)
• vs. ACH/Tadarius Thomas, ROH (6/22/2013)
• vs. The Hardys, TNA (7/31/2014)
• vs. The Hardys vs. Team 3D, TNA (10/8/2014)
• vs. Biff Busick/Drew Gulak, SMASH (4/26/2015)

 

 

23. YAMADOI

PREVIOUS: 5 (2015)

 

Truly, it is not fair.

I have less data on these two compared to the Shingo/YAMATO and Speed Muscle reunion runs earlier in the decade, but truthfully (at least this decade, few teams hold a candle to 2000s Speed Muscle in terms of cohesion), neither compares to just how perfectly YAMATO and Doi fit together.

They should have teamed together regularly for half the decade.

Had they gotten more than a year to a year and a half as a (mostly) dedicated tag team — specifically if they had had it during stronger periods for the company or with even better prolonged opposition, say if they were the big MAD BLANKEY team when they first formed rather than YAMATO and BxB — they very easily could have wound up as a top ten tag team of the decade, rather than simply being Dragon Gate‘s second best, for every reason listed above. 

What we have is what we have though, and fortunately, it’s enough to say that YAMATO and Naruki Doi were one of the most natural fits of the entire decade. Two different but equally perfect kinds of scumbag energy, a similar philosophy, and in tag settings, primarily unable to get into the kinds of DG Brain Sickness layout that often doomed them in tag team matches. Doi and YAMATO both had their perfect fit partnerships as protagonists, Masato Yoshino and Shingo Takagi respectively, but together,

The nicest thing to say about Doi and YAMATO together is that, even put into a DG heel team formula that I usually hate, they were still far and away one of the best fits together in company history.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• w/ Cyber Kong vs. Masato Yoshino/Shingo Takagi/Akira Tozawa vs. Jimmy Susumu/Jimmy Kagetora/Jimmy Kanda vs. BxB Hulk/Kzy/Big R Shimizu, DG (3/6/2015)
• w/ Masato Yoshino vs. CIMA/Matt Sydal/Ricochet, DG (7/2/2015)
• vs. Ricochet/Matt Sydal, DG (7/20/2015)
• vs. Masato Yoshino/T-Hawk, DG (11/1/2015)
• vs. T-Hawk/Big R Shimizu, DG (3/6/2016)

 

 

22. FUTURE SHOCK (ADAM COLE & KYLE O’REILLY)

 

Another short run and another real perfect fit as teammates.

Kyle O‘Reilly and Adam Cole found each other almost on accident, thrown together as young guys in a jobber-to-the-stars tag team in the fall of 2010. The thing was that, discovered in October of that year against Kevin Steen and Steve Corino, that they immediately fit together and were genuinely a ton of fun, and so much better at that point together than apart. Unpolished (although polish eventually removed so much from Cole), but one of the great young lion teams of the decade.

Put against every major independent tag team on the scene in ROH and PWG in 2011 and 2012, Cole and Kyle were great against all of them. The versatility case isn‘t there so much outside of a PWG outing or two with a harder edge once Cole turned (or if you want to squint and count some Undisputed Era six man tags, but those always felt more representative of a different Kyle team to me) and a pair of genuinely really fun reunion matches in 2015 ROH, back when the company accidentally invented the Undisputed Era two years early, but as a babyface supergroup, but I’m alright with that. In terms of a specific niche — the American version of a classical Japanese team of can’t miss singles prospects in their early stages — Cole and Kyle did this sort of thing better than anyone else all decade in their time together. 

The two-night stretch doing this against the Briscoes and Kings of Wrestling over WrestleMania Weekend in 2011 is as impressive a showing as I can recall from any young tag team all decade, the Young Bucks match in their PWG debut is in the same category, and generally speaking, just about every Future Shock tag is interesting or exciting or fun in some way.

Like the Smash Bros as well, a testament to the idea that if you don‘t have a long period of sustained greatness or some other problems, a peak a high as these teams had against each other and The Young Bucks is a pretty nice thing to hang the hat on.

Pretty easily the second best Kyle tag team of the decade.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. The Briscoes, ROH (4/1/2011)
• vs. The Kings of Wrestling, ROH (4/2/2011)
• vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (10/22/2011)
• vs. The Young Bucks vs. Super Smash Bros., PWG (7/21/2012)
• vs. Dojo Bros, PWG (1/13/2013)
• vs. The Young Bucks, ROH (9/11/2015)

 

 

21. AMERICAN ALPHA (CHAD GABLE & JASON JORDAN)

PREVIOUS: 4 (2016)

 

The first of three NXT tag teams on the list.

Unlike the other two, there’s a potential as a team that I don’t think Jordan and Gable as a team ever quite lived up to.

Throughout the twenty-one months in between their first match together on NXT TV and their last televised one on Smackdown, Gable and Jordan were always good. An exciting and likeable team with a lot of cool moves, seeming conceptually like a mostly successful attempt to cross-breed The Steiners and a Fantastics/RNRX/Rockers style team, with a respectable amount of great matches against some fairly varied (for WWE anyways) teams.

It’s a real solid resume given the time constraints.

However, American Alpha always felt like a year or two away from developing into something even better. They were improving almost every week for the duration of their run, but still always felt like kids in a way that I find hard to totally communicate. Not so much being held by the hands, they contributed too much to every great match they had, but there was something about all of their matches that felt incomplete or unrealized to me. 75% or more of a great thing, but almost always missing something, only to be split apart before they could finish finding whatever that was.

That’s not their fault entirely.

WWE being the WWE, it was never great for them. They were a wrestling centric act in a company that has never put the highest value on that. They were a pure tag team in a company that hasn’t cared for that sort of thing in and of itself in a very long time. They were always playing a losing game once they left the protective bubble of NXT, and eventually, the house won as it almost always does. They never did all that they could have because they were never going to, and with Jason Jordan’s untimely retirement, what we got was all we’re probably ever going to get. Fortunately, what we got was really really good.

The ultimate testament to these two together is that despite all that unrealized potential together, they still had the run that they did.

One of the great “what if” questions of the decade.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. DIY, WWE (10/28/2015)
• vs. The Revival, WWE (4/1/2016)
• vs. The Revival, WWE (6/8/2016)
• vs. Randy Orton/Bray Wyatt vs. The Usos vs. Heath Slater/Rhino, WWE (12/27/2016)
• vs. Randy Orton/Bray Wyatt, WWE (1/10/2017)

 

 

20. DANGAN YANKEES (MASATO TANAKA & TAKASHI SUGIURA)

 

Another super team, but one with just a little more staying power.

Masato Tanaka and Takashi Sugiura — by virtue of their ages (coming near the end of the prime of each man), their own statures in their home promotions, their respective commitments to said promotions meaning they were never truly a full-time tag team, and only really being together for a year to a year and a half — had something of a ceiling on them.

True to form, their hurled their arms, legs, and skulls into it as forcefully and as recklessly as possible.

If you want versatility and adaptability, Sugiura and Tanaka are not the team for you. They wrestle how they wrestle. The old “fun match about hitting” routine in full force, done by wrestlers who were better than most at the time — although realistically still only the third best team in the country at that style — at building and executing matches like that. Not so much masters of nuance as much as understanding more often than not that there are limitations and how to get out before the routine got old.

Most of the time, it worked out pretty well.

There are wars against a lot of other one-off combinations in ZERO1, but my favorite of those came in 2015 in Big Japan, for maybe the best all-star tag of the decade. If you want something a little more spirited and with the proper amount of contempt and violence of spirit, there’s a killer slugfest against KENTA and Takayama in NOAH. Maybe most impressively, over the course of three or four matches during their run as a team, they even tricked people into thinking (in some cases nearly a decade on after the fact) that TMDK was a genuinely great tag team and helping them to pretty easily and without much competition at all the best work of their careers.

Not the greatest super team of the decade, but a tremendous proof of concept.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. KENTA/Yoshihiro Takayama, NOAH (4/12/2014)
• vs. Daisuke Sekimoto/Kazushi Hashimoto, ZERO1 (6/1/2014)
• vs. TMDK, NOAH (7/5/2014)
• vs. TMDK, NOAH (10/12/2014)
• vs. TMDK, NOAH (1/10/2015)
• w/ Daisuke Sekimoto vs. HARASHIMA/Yuji Okabayashi/Yuji Hino, BJW (6/30/2015)

 

 

19. SHINGO TAKAGI & YAMATO

PREVIOUS: 2 (2012)

 

There are two major difference between a team like YAMADoi, or some of the DG teams on the Honorable Mentions list, and these two.

First, super importantly, this is not a one or two year team.

Shingo Takagi and YAMATO were together from the start of the decade through the summer of 2013, and then in terms of multi-man tags in VerserK, for another year in 2015-6. More than any other really high end team in the company all decade, they not had the time to team together, but genuinely spent a large chunk of that time teaming together.

That’s the other major thing.

A problem so many Dragon Gate teams have — or team really in any Japanese promotion that either shuffles things around constantly or primarily uses heavyweight tags as build-ups to singles matches, which is to say a large number of them — is that you rarely get to see them team up in a real committed way.

YAMATO and Shingo Takagi not only teamed for three and a half years, but they teamed regularly for three and a half years. Not just haphazardly, but largely focused on the Twin Gate titles and having enough great two-on-two matches that it became real hard to ignore at a point when I was putting together Recommended Match listings and so many other DG teams’ cases were largely down to great six or eight or ten man tags, or the famous multi-trio matches. Shingo Takagi and YAMATO were not only a great combination, but a great tag team. There are great slugfests against the Fujii & Mochizuki team, them kicking ass as guts and power babyfaces against teams like BxB & Tozawa or BxB & Uhaa Nation, them as harder-edged babyfaces against more sympathetic ones like the Jimmyz or Speed Muscle, all of it.

There just isn‘t a weak point here, outside of that they ever broke up in the first place, and even that was an objective good given the strengths of both, and the teams/units — YAMADoi & Monster Express — that came out of it. 

Really maybe the most underrated tag team of the decade.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Masaaki Mochizuki/Don Fujii, DG (8/5/2010)
• vs. BxB Hulk/Akira Tozawa, DG (8/21/2011)
• vs. Jimmy Susumu/Jimmy Kagetora, DG (7/22/2012)
• vs. Speed Muscle, DG (8/2/2012)
• vs. Masaaki Mochizuki/Don Fujii, DG (9/23/2012)
• vs. BxB Hulk/Uhaa Nation, DG (5/5/2013)

 

 

18. NIGHTMARE VIOLENCE CONNECTION (KEVIN STEEN & AKIRA TOZAWA)

PREVIOUS: 4 (2011)

 

Sometimes longevity doesn‘t really mean shit though. 

Kevin Steen and Akira Tozawa were another one of those perfect pairings. Two high energy guys who were not only absolute freaks on both sides of a match but impossible to ever look away from at any given time, in the most perfect possible environment in all of wrestling history for them. They were perfect babyfaces in a big brother/little brother act against teams like the Bucks and Kings of Wrestling, but also incredible antagonists in their only ever reunion match. They only ever had six matches together, but all six rocked, half of them were among the best matches of the year at the time, and their absolute best was one of the best matches of the decade.

It isn‘t a perfect case, but the only flaw here is that we didn‘t get to see enough of them together for a flaw to emerge. 

They don’t have tremendous volume, as much versatility as you maybe want, and by far the least longevity of any tag team I even considered for this list, let alone those who made it in. And at the same time, everything they did was just so overwhelmingly great and cool and fun as hell.

Genuinely, one of my favorite things in pro wrestling all decade, so much so that all the other stuff fades away.

The ideals peaks over everything else argument.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. The Briscoes, PWG (3/4/2011)
• vs. The Kings of Wrestling, PWG (3/4/2011)
• vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (3/4/2011)
• vs. El Generico/Ricochet, PWG (5/27/2011)
• w/ Super Dragon vs. El Generico/Masato Yoshino/PAC, PWG (1/29/2012)

 

 

17. RODERICK STRONG & KYLE O’REILLY 

PREVIOUS: 2 (2018)

 

Another short but real high peak.

Like a lot of the great things to come out of the WWE this decade, the Strong and O’Reilly team feels like something that was never supposed to happen. A sudden shift, a stopgap measure while Bobby Fish was out hurt for most of 2018, before Roderick rotated back out when he returned, for reasons either boring and probably true (Triple H and NXT have no imagination and only wanted WWE branded versions of hot ROH acts from five years earlier) or more kind and positive (Roderick deserved a singles spotlight), dealer’s choice.

At some point, intent matters far less than results though, and the makeshift U.E. team wound up being the best combination of any of the four, and had one of the better one-year peaks of any tag team in wrestling all decade.

Roderick Strong and Kyle O’Reilly, immediately, fit perfectly together. Not in the way every Roddy team does, but in the way a select few do, and in the way no other Kyle team has, even the other one on this list.

Every purely two on two match that Roddy and Kyle had — and most three on three, when adding in Adam Cole — delivered. Not just the widely regarded and highly acclaimed Mustache Mountain stuff, but the Oney/Burch Takeover tag that was as great as almost any Takeover tag ever, or the War Machine match in October that was a clean finish away from being on that level too. The biggest achievement of their year together might be what happened near the very end, taking all the gifts of a fun but real inexperienced heavyweight team like Heavy Machinery, but managing to direct them into a genuinely great match. The easy thing to do is talk about casual force of talent or whatever, but truly, all of their great matches as a team were great in large part because of the effort both put in and how well they immediately clicked. Individually, it was also the best continuous run of work from Kyle O’Reilly that I’ve ever seen, and the best version of him that’s ever existed. It’s not an easy thing to be the best guy in a match also involving Roderick Strong, but at least a time or two together, Kyle did that, and when he didn’t quite achieve that, the team still had the all-world performances of Roderick Strong to fall back on.

Had Triple H and NXT had the courage or imagination to not retreat back to the familiar as soon as possible and/or not feel the need to make Roddy spend six months hand holding multiple sex creeps through Takeover singles matches — or less insultingly, had they found each other before they did in all of their time on the same shows for the first six and a half years of the decade — they would likely be far far higher than this.

The American YAMADoi.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Oney Lorcan/Danny Burch, WWE (6/16/2018)
• vs. Mustache Mountain, WWE (7/11/2018)
• vs. Mustache Mountain, WWE (8/18/2018)
• vs. War Raiders, WWE (10/17/2018)
• vs. Heavy Machinery, WWE (12/26/2018)

 

 

16. THE GOLDEN LOVERS (KOTA IBUSHI & KENNY OMEGA)

PREVIOUS: 3 (2018)

 

A tale of two tag teams.

The first, a really fun junior heavyweight tag team focused on a consistent fireworks display that few other teams could match.

As seen in the great Apollo 55 series (yes, it is great, even if I never quite got the praise for the first match), but way more impressively shown in all their DDT work. Particularly impressive was their elevation of a young Happy Motel team of Takeshita and Endo, although clearly the best match from this point was their beautiful stunt show against opposing super team HARASHIMA & KUDO. Both were sensational and super super flawed as singles wrestlers, and in a tag team setting, both were at their best, before splitting up and in Omega’s case, no longer even being close to it again for years.

Both took too much of the decade off from teaming for the Lovers to be one of the absolute best teams of the decade, and at the same time, it’s the time apart that allowed their second run to be great enough to get them on the list to begin with. 

When they reunited three or four years later in New Japan, they were a (lighter) heavyweight super team, used in tag matches either to build up singles matches for either man on larger events or as a big special attraction themselves. It’s this run that impressed me the most and really got them here, a more refined and practiced feeling version of everything they were initially about as a result of major improvements both men made, still focused on doing a ton of incredibly spectacular offense, but now great enough at the other things to achieve more than just that. The side effect of each man peaking individually, and largely functioning as individual wrestlers, was not only that their matches together had few weak points, but that every Golden Lovers tag felt important as well. The result of that is a sort of special thing that rarely happens with a regular tag team in wrestling, where not only did every team up in their second run together feel like a genuine event, but where almost every team up delivered on that feeling with a remarkably great match.

The tag team never exactly fixes their brains, they are still always prone to do some stuff I do not love, but it minimizes their ability to do those things. They will hit some and miss some, always, but what worked about the Golden Lovers is that, together, they hit with even more success and regularity than usual. Kenny and Kota simply are who they are, forces of nature that need to be channeled in one way or another, but as a team, it was far easier to do that. 

It ought to come as no surprise in the end that the career year for each came when they got to team up together again.

Something about it just works.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Apollo 55 (Prince Devitt/Ryusuke Taguchi), NJPW (10/11/2010)
• vs. HARASHIMA/KUDO, DDT (1/30/2011)
• vs. Apollo 55, NJPW (8/14/2011)
• vs. The Young Bucks, NJPW (3/25/2018)
• vs. Cody Rhodes/Hangman Page, NJPW (4/1/2018)
• vs. Kazuchika Okada/Tomohiro Ishii, NJPW (9/30/2018)

 

 

15. THE REVIVAL (DASH WHEELER & SCOTT DAWSON)

previous: 1 (2016)

 

Pretty obviously the top NXT team here.

The better version of the American Alpha case, more or less. They had more great NXT matches against a wider swath of teams, with higher highs as well, including one of the best matches of the decade against a team not even on this list. While also fucked over by injuries and a main roster environment very much not for them, they also found a way to overcome that by the end of the decade, and sort of secretly had a really good 2019, giving them the kind of staying power that many of their contemporaries lacked.

Really though, it does just come down to that 2016 peak.

They were the best tag team in the world for a year, had some of the best matches of the decade, were the driving force behind the career work of several teams and wrestlers, did so utilizing a refreshing spin on modern style tag wrestling really only touched by The Briscoes, and on top of that, also did so with a gimmick so beautiful (annoying tape nerds) that it has made many of the dumbest wrestling fans in the world pants shittingly angry on a near constant basis ever since.

It is not always so complex.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. American Alpha, WWE (4/1/2016)
• vs. American Alpha, WWE (6/8/2016)
• vs. DIY, WWE (8/20/2016)
• vs. DIY, WWE (11/19/2016)
• vs. Ricochet/Aleister Black vs. Chad Gable/Bobby Roode, WWE (3/10/2019)
• vs. New Day Classic, WWE (12/15/2019)

 

 

14. THE USOS

PREVIOUS: 2 (2017)

 

It’s not an especially clean case.

The Usos — who debuted on television six months into the decade and stayed a tag team that entire time in a division filled with the sort of talent that the wealthiest wrestling company of all time could afford — probably did not do all that they should have, given all the advantages they had.

Or maybe they did. Hell, maybe they did more than they should have, when you really look at it.

I don’t know.

The Usos were never entirely great, and aside from maybe their first year or year and a half, were also never entirely bad. They were always at least a little derivative, and if you’re reading this, I don’t think that’s exactly something we have to dwell on, whether that means Young Bucks routines in the ring or borderline Briscoes theft on the mic, but it’s there and even at their best, they always felt a little bit like a cover band. They struggled a lot of the time to make the bodies of matches interesting when in control as antagonists. They were more than a little plain as protagonists in the first half of the decade. They were never ever the best team in a great tag team match. They also contributed more than their fair share to every great tag team match they had, were reliable opponents to all the better WWE tag teams on this list, and have a track record across the majority of the decade that feels impossible to totally ignore either, just because it seems obvious that other teams could have done even more with much of the same material.

Jey and Jimmy are the most frustrating and confusing team on the list. Ignoring all the misses or average efforts feels just as dishonest and incorrect as only focusing on the big major hits with the Wyatts or The New Day. I can’t put them higher than teams without some of those weaknesses, even if The Usos dwarf them on longevity, but what they have going for them also beats out a whole lot of other tag team this decade.

I don’t love them, I’m not sure I would ever call them a genuinely great tag team, and their inconsistency is almost as frustrating as the acclaim they get from people who haven’t seen anything else. All that aside, the output is the output, the highs are the highs, all of that, and although a team with their opportunities and longevity probably should have far more impressive results, the results actually produced are still pretty impressive.

Somehow, it feels like they both under and over-achieved.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. The Shield (Roman Reigns/Seth Rollins), WWE (7/14/2013)
• vs. The Wyatt Family (Luke Harper/Erick Rowan), WWE (6/29/2014)
• vs. The Wyatt Family, WWE (7/20/2014)
• vs. New Day Classic vs. The Lucha Dragons, WWE (12/13/2015)
• vs. New Day Power, WWE (8/20/2017)
• vs. New Day Power, WWE (10/8/2017)

 

 

13. NEW DAY (KOFI KINGSTON, BIG E, & XAVIER WOODS)

previous: 3 (2017)

 

It just seems right to have them back to back, doesn’t it?

They’re the other part of the equation.

While certainly far far far more original in the ring and as characters than The Usos, and definitely all better individual wrestlers, it doesn’t feel unfair to levy a lot of the same criticisms at The New Day. They were a focal point, if not the focal point, of the tag team division in the WWE for most of the second half of the decade, with the combination of longevity and institutional support (at least as a unit) that a few other WWE tag teams this decade would probably kill for, but failed to amount a resume on the level of teams together for a fraction of the time. There’s more to it than just matches, of course. They were always incredibly entertaining to watch and that really does matter, the ability to make and elevate lesser material, but it still feels like they should have put together a much stronger case than they ultimately did.

Still, it is a very good case.

Everyone knows about the series against The Usos. The best match in the series made the Match of the Decade shortlist, and pretty much every match they had in that run was great. Before that though, back when The Usos were still nerds, they also had some pretty good matches, including a forgotten gem in a three way ladder match also involving the Lucha Brothers. Name a tag team in the last half decade on WWE main roster TV, and The New Day probably had a great one with them. The Bar? An underwhelming team in practice, but their best work by far was against the New Day. Removed from the magic of the Wyatt Family and tasked with an all-decade loser of a gimmick, the only great Bludgeon Brothers tag was against The New Day. The short lived Cesaro and Kidd team never really got to live up to their potential, but did worlds better against The New Day than anyone else they faced. The same goes for the Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn heel team, which never really found itself in the way it did outside of WWE or would years later as a babyface team, but had their best work against The New Day. The Revival? The team I just wrote about being all wrong for the WWE main roster, but who did manage to have a decent little run in the last year of the decade? A big part of that was a successful New Day feud.

So, why do they get the slight nudge over The Usos, who maybe have just a few more really next-level great matches?

Big E, Kofi, and Woods weren’t together during the Shield/Wyatts TV era, so they don’t quite have the on-paper resume that The Usos do, but I’m more impressed with what they put together. Not only on paper, but how they turned everything around after a total failure as babyfaces initially in a far more self-possessed way than The Usos did during their own heel run. What also really puts them ahead of The Usos is how much they contributed to all of their great matches on a performance level, especially some of those Woods and Big E performances in the famous series, and how much better the New Day did against a lot of common opponents. They’re just better, and they’re better in every way a team can be better.

The New Day has a slightly better version of the same flawed case. A lot of high profile great matches over a large stretch of time, but also a whole lot of real average wrestling that doesn’t look so great compared to a lot of teams who did more with less, including some in the very same promotion.

I like them, I like them a whole lot, but it’s hard to go much higher than this.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Cesaro/Tyson Kidd, WWE (5/17/2015)
• vs. The Usos vs. The Lucha Dragons, WWE (12/14/2015)
• vs. The Bar, WWE (12/18/2016)
• vs. The Usos, WWE (8/20/2017)
• vs. The Usos, WWE (10/8/2017)
• vs. The Bludgeon Brothers, WWE (8/21/2018)

 

 

12. THE WYATT FAMILY/THE BLUDGEON BROTHERS (LUKE HARPER & ERICK ROWAN)

PREVIOUS: 2 (2014)

 

On that note, here’s another one of those teams that was even better than The Usos in all of those great matches.

The Wyatt Family/The Bludgeon Brothers/The Hammer Homies/Sort Of Top Guy Heel September & October 2019 Erick Rowan & Harper As His Heater For Some Fucking Reason? are here primarily because of one really great year together. There’s a good Brothers match when they lose the belts to the New Day in 2018, the pay-per-view match a year later against the Reigns & Bryan superteam is also pretty fun, but mostly, yeah, it’s the big Wyatts run. Another team on the list here because of one exceptional year.

It is a really exceptional year though.

Throughout the summer of 2013 through spring of 2014, the WWE went on a heater like they hadn’t in a while and haven’t really since. The Wyatt Family and their tags were one part of that, along with Daniel Bryan, The Shield, the Rhodes brothers, Cesaro, Sheamus, Punk, Cena, Orton on occasion, Rey Mysterio, and a few others. It would be wrong to say large scale issues were fixed so much as that they briefly had a fastball in terms of utilizing the roster that was there, but pretty much every great wrestler on the main roster was able to show something, and for the Wyatts, it meant a solid seven or eight months of really great tag team matches against every babyface on the roster in one rotation or another. You know the big standouts already, the pay-per-view Usos series, The Shield at the Elimination Chamber, but the gems run deeper than that, like every Bryan six man, or their mini-feud against the Rhodes brothers. It’s not a long run, but compared to some other one-year or shorter runs on the list, there’s so much here on top of the peaks.

Even having said all that, they are clearly the third of the big WWE teams in that incredible 2013-14 run of TV/PPV work. They didn’t quite the shine that The Shield did or the narrative against a bunch of other teams, so it’s hard to put it entirely on them, but this is also a team that’s more uneven than any other on this list in terms of where the quality comes from. Goldust was clearly better than Cody Rhodes, but even that gap wasn’t this. Rowan was a fine big guy crowbar, but the award may as well just go to Luke Harper/Brodie Lee himself given the big man tour de force that he seemed to put on every time the spotlight got put on them together, and given the strength of the six-man run, a little to Bray Wyatt too.

Like with the Usos though, the results are the results. Not entirely clean, but undeniable, achieving more in (mostly) one year together than other teams did in far more than double their time together.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• w/ Bray Wyatt/The Shield vs. CM Punk/Daniel Bryan/Cody Rhodes/Goldust/The Usos, WWE (11/18/2013)
• vs. Cody Rhodes/Goldust, WWE (1/3/2014)
• w/ Bray Wyatt vs. The Shield, WWE (2/23/2014)
• vs. The Usos, WWE (6/29/2014)
• vs. The Usos, WWE (7/20/2014)
• vs. New Day, WWE (8/21/2018)

 

 

11. MOTOR CITY MACHINE GUNS (ALEX SHELLEY & CHRIS SABIN)

PREVIOUS: 2 (2010)

 

The Machine Guns are another example of a single year peak, but land higher than other team like that for a few reasons.

Primarily, they’re here because of their run in 2010.

Shelley and Sabin were absolutely the bright spot of TNA that year, but I fear that in saying that, a lot of people might not actually get how great they were because of the lower bar that comes with a statement like that. The thing all the great single-year peaks do, great series of matches with multiple teams, all of that, is part of what they did. The Beer Money series that again saw them be the only tag team to really regularly translate Beer Money being a really fun TV act into regular great matches. The Young Bucks series that certainly didn’t hand them their first great matches or anything, but still felt like a real achievement given their lack of experience under the restraints of a major promotion. Couple it with the jewel in the crown of a trip to ROH and a remarkable outing against the Kings of Wrestling, the only tag team in the world better than them, and in most other years (put this campaign into the environments of other years, I think they would have won 2012, maybe 2015/2016/2018, and 2017/2019 for sure), it would be a slam dunk Tag Team of the Year case.

It’s one of the best years any tag team had all decade, made all the more impressive because of where it happened. They did what the did in shorter matches on the middle of the card on otherwise pretty terrible TNA shows, which stands out so much compared to the freedom The Young Bucks or Kings of Wrestling or Ringkampf or Strong BJ had, or the institutional attention and focus of teams like The Shield or The Revival.

The other reason is that there is an entire second run that many people forget about in ROH later in the decade that while not great due to the promotion and neither man being at their best at the time — hence the largescale memory holing — still showed there was life here (which their 2020s reunion has displayed with far greater emphasis). Great matches against a totally different Bucks team, multi-mans with their kids Jay White and Jonathan Gresham in an oft-forgotten (a theme here maybe) stable, and the crown jewel of the three way Ladder War with the Bucks and the Daniels and Kazarian team all prove that. On its own, it wouldn’t be all that much, but as an accompaniment, it’s a handy little case maker.

One of the greatest tag teams of all time, who spent the majority of the decade apart, but when together, showed why that was mostly such a shame.

“Mostly” because while separated and with Sabin stuck on his own in TNA, another far more enterprising promotion put half of this team to very successful use, resulting in yet another one of the best tag teams of the decade.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Generation Me, TNA (3/21/2010)
• vs. The King of Wrestling, ROH (5/8/2010)
• vs. Beer Money, TNA (8/12/2010)
• vs. Generation Me, TNA (11/18/2010)
• vs. The Young Bucks, NJPW (8/21/2016)
• vs. The Young Bucks vs. The Addiction, ROH (9/30/2016)

 

 

10. THE TIMESPLITTERS (KUSHIDA & ALEX SHELLEY)

 

By a hair, I think the Machine Guns get beat out by another Alex Shelley team.

Are they better all time than the Guns? No. Of course not. Relax. I’m not some kind of apostate here.

Did they have a better decade than the Machine Guns?

I think so, yeah.

KUSHIDA and Shelley had a solid two to three years together, and primarily spent that as a regular tag team. Occasional singles work, but largely focused on the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Titles, with all the opportunities to tag up that the New Japan schedule allowed. Fortunate enough that their time together happened to coincide with what I would call the company’s real peak years of the decade, 2013-15, the roster and placement was also such that they had the opposition and opportunities to make the most of everything afforded to them.

I also know that I might be the high man on the Timesplitters, much like possibly the game they took their name from, so allow me for a moment.

The Machine Guns, and a few other teams, have a few more consistent highs and higher highs than the Splitters do. They really only hit that next level in their feud-ender against The Young Bucks, but that also happens to be one of my favorite matches of the decade. The strength of Shelley and KUSHIDA lies in their consistency, and how for their entire run together, it’s hard to find a single time they disappointed. Even in matches clearly not designed to be all that great — like the Apollo 55 match that was a prelude to the Bullet Club formation — they deliver. The few times the match is maybe not as great as possible, like that or the first of the handful of reDRagon matches, it always feels made up for by a time when they do get it actually right, like the first Apollo 55 match in 2012, or every other reDRagon match that followed. Pair that with how I don’t think anyone ever got more out of Forever Hooligans or reDRagon than Shelley and KUSHIDA did, sprinkle your standard Briscoes hit in ROH that lets me know it isn’t just the NJPW environment, and it’s a better case than I think a lot of people maybe think, looking at it from far away and seeing a lack of high-level peaks.

On top of the pure track record, Shelley and KUSHIDA also have a neat little long-form story to their entire time, as little brother KUSHIDA grows up from start to finish, taking more of a role in their successes rather than being Shelley’s sidekick as he felt like in the beginning. It’s not only something that gave their matches more depth than NJPW juniors tags tend to have, but also something that not a lot of tag teams anywhere in wrestling managed to pull off.

Realistically, they’re not in the top five and maybe not in the top ten either, but the entire TimeSplitters project — the aesthetic, the matches, and the overarching narrative — was one of my favorite parts of Peak New Japan, and it feels like exactly enough to land them in the top ten.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Apollo 55, NJPW (11/2/2012)
• vs. Forever Hooligans, NJPW (6/22/2013)
• vs. The Young Bucks, NJPW (6/21/2014)
• w/ Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Tetsuya Naito/Kota Ibushi/El Desperado, NJPW (6/29/2014)
• vs. reDRagon, NJPW (11/8/2014)
• vs. The Briscoes, ROH (8/22/2015)
• vs. Ricochet/Matt Sydal, NJPW (10/24/2015)

 

 

9. DOJO BROS (RODERICK STRONG & EDDIE EDWARDS)

PREVIOUS: 3 (2013)

 

Oh, did you think we were done with the short run/high peak cases just because this was the top ten?

No, sorry, this is just where the really great versions of that case exist.

Reverse engineering it — as I haven’t done the 2000s and I don’t know if I actually will — there is some precedent, I think.

In 2006, El Generico and the lesser known Quicksilver formed one of my favorite tag teams of all time, Cape Fear. They only ever teamed in PWG, only lasted fourteen months together, and had less than twenty matches together. In a less stacked tag team year than 2006 (seriously, the divisions in ROH, TNA, PWG, CHIKARA, even occasionally in WWE are all nuts, and that doesn’t even bring up Japan), they may have been the tag team of the year anyways. It was a perfect underdog babyface team, two of the same types who immediately clicked together from their first match, constantly succeeded against many of the best tag teams in the world, and who were the highlights of one of the best wrestling years of the decade. Thinking about it blindly, I would be hard pressed to make a list of the best tag teams of the 2000s and not include Cape Fear, and making the top ten in the 2010s roughly translates in my head to making the top twenty five in the 2000s.

The Dojo Bros are this decade’s version of Cape Fear.

Roddy and Eddie aren’t underdogs exactly, but in their year together in PWG, they clicked immediately and had a bunch of super high energy matches that were the highlight of one of the great PWG years. Against a bunch of the best tag teams alive, they never missed. The two Young Bucks matches are among the best the Bucks ever had, and the three way ladder against the Inner City Machine Guns would be talked up as a PWG classic had it not had to live in the shadow of a better version of that a year earlier. They also had a few astonishing successes like a Gargano/Chuck tag I actually loved, a half hour Beyond tag that I loved even more, and maybe the best ever Best Friends non-gimmick tag match. It’s not the most diverse resume, Eddie is going to have an Eddie match and Roddy at this point hadn’t developed the best-in-the-world level heel routine, but every single one of these matches whips so much ass.

What they lack compared to historical precedent — the feel good title win, more matches together in that year in PWG — they make up for by sort of secretly also having another totally opposite life as a single-tour heel team in NOAH at the start of the decade.

Even before Eddie really really began to get great, something about the team brought out the best version of him against far better wrestlers like KENTA, Nakajima, Atsushi Aoki, and Yoshinari Ogawa. At the same time that the Wolves were a little less successful, Roddy and Eddie teamed up and not only totally clicked in functionally the same dipshit heel jock role that the Wolves had struggled with, but the run together in NOAH was also the point at which Eddie Edwards began to improve. Which is to say that not only where the (then unnamed) Dojo Bros immediately great in their brief time together years earlier, but that they were also the cause for improvement for another tag team on this list.

So yes, sure, they only teamed for like a year and a month, if you put it all together. Less than twenty of those twenty five matches are easily available, and really when you account for 2CW and early PWX, it is closer to fifteen. They did not team long enough to have the chances either had with their other tag teams on this list.

In the face of all that they did though, none of that matters too much to me.

They are still one of the best tag teams of the decade, and like their doomed counterparts, one of my favorite teams ever.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. KENTA/Atsushi Aoki, NOAH (10/30/2010)
• vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (12/1/2012)
• vs. Future Shock, PWG (1/12/2013)
• vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (3/23/2013)
• vs. The Young Bucks vs. Inner City Machine Guns, PWG (8/9/2013)
•  vs. Biff Busick/Drew Gulak, Beyond (9/15/2013)
• vs. Best Friends, PWG (12/20/2013)

 

 

8. RINGKAMPF (WALTER & TIMOTHY THATCHER)

PREVIOUS: 1 (2017), 4 (2018)

 

The list is sacred.

WALTER and Thatcher comprised another shorter lived tag team that gelled perfectly and immediately, even before they were ever a real tag team. The differences between them and the team before them though are that they got to do it for even longer, and due to the places where they worked, like peak schedule PROGRESS and WXW, that they got to team together far more.

Primarily, it’s WXW that makes the difference here.

Ringkampf might have gotten their prestige matches in PWG against other super teams, or fought TNA stars in Beyond Wrestling, but it’s the regular work in WXW that makes such a difference. Not only in those high profile matches against other stars of the era, but way more impressively, against the children in the promotion. Essentially, if you want to know that Ringkampf are great, you can watch them against a handful of different CCK combinations or a Sekimoto/Munenori Sawa combination on WrestleMania Weekend, but if you want to know how great they are, look at what they did on WXW shows against the RISE kids or especially the feud ending blowoff match with Bobby Gunns and Jaxon Stone. Or, in another way, look at the output the Lucha Brothers have had against almost every other team they’ve faced compared with their one match against Ringkampf, to see what they were capable of getting out of all different types of inferior tag teams and wrestlers.

Of course, there’s also the fact that against all-time greats in WXW, like The Rottweilers or The Briscoes, WALTER and Thatcher had some of the best matches of the decade, and looked every bit at home in the ring with the all-timers, not only having matches as sound as any other they had had, but now matches that felt like genuinely important spectacles as well.

They were always going to be drawn apart again before too long, teams made up of maybe the two best wrestlers in the world at given moment rarely last, but few teams made as much of their time together in as many different and interesting ways as WALTER and Thatcher did.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Mike Bailey/Tyler Bate, WXW (3/10/2016)
• vs. The Rottweilers, WXW (10/5/2017)
• vs. The Briscoes, WXW (10/6/2017)
• vs. Bobby Gunns/Jaxon Stone, WXW (11/17/2017)
• vs. EYFBO (LAX), Beyond (5/25/2018)
• vs. Jonathan Gresham/Chris Brookes, WXW (10/5/2018)
• vs. The Lucha Brothers, WXW (10/6/2018)

 

 

7. CODY RHODES & GOLDUST

PREVIOUS: 3 (2013)

 

Talk about teams that packed a whole lot into a short time together.

I have written now, and you have read, about teams that did a lot with a year or so together, or who primarily made their case in the span of one twelve month period. The Dojo Bros, the Wyatts, Roddy and Kyle, The Revival and MCMG more or less, all of that. With one exception, The Rhodes Brothers topped all of that.

Functionally, as that Goldust/Stardust business barely counted and resulted in basically nothing of note, the Rhodes brothers make this case over five months from the start of October 2013 through March 2014.

During those six months, the Rhodes Brothers almost exclusively wrestle tag team matches, frequently doing it twice a week against great opposition like The Shield, the Wyatts, Cesaro, etc., and almost always had enough time for those matches to succeed. I would call it stacking the deck, but given many of the same advantages or similar ones, other teams failed to achieve the same. Teams like The Shield or others maybe have more great tags in this (relative) golden period, but with a fraction of the time and without the advantage of many of those matches being against maybe the greatest wrestler of all time in Bryan, Cody and Dustin achieve on a comparable level.

In all of those great matches too, the performances also always stand out.

Goldust came back with such a vengeance that this first six months back before WWE forgets about him near the end of this golden age (part of the reason it’s the end of this golden age!) that I think it’s one of the best comebacks ever. Full stop. He’s a forty four year old man when he comes back and he looks like potentially the best wrestler in the world. Not in the way that forty plus year old veterans often do, transitioning into being Big Match Guys and killing it once or twice a month in big time matches. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what Goldust does or what he’d ever be allowed to do, no matter how good and surprisingly open to interesting concepts the WWE was at the time. Instead, he kills it on a weekly TV match sort of level, which is honestly unheard of for a guy his age. The easy joke is to go, “…and Cody Rhodes is also in this tag team” and compare it to Harper and Rowan, but that also feels wrong. I’m no huge Cody fan, I’m not going to lie and tell you that Goldust isn’t clearly the better wrestler or anything like that, but Cody holds his own. He’s genuinely very good. It’s the most consistent period of good work of his entire career and while I like some of his post-WWE bloodletting displays, this feels like the most consistent best use of him throughout his entire career. Goldust is steering the ship and Cody is adding a lot to these matches too.

Cody and Dustin are in good to great matches virtually every week they exist, maybe trailing off some at the end when forgotten about. A few of those matches are among the best of the decade. They’re also great in all these matches individually. On top of pure artistic quality, they’re also a central part of my favorite televised wrestling experience of the decade, and the driving force behind one of the most cathartic and uplifting moments of the decade as pictured above.

This six to twelve month period in the WWE always sort of felt like everyone watching was getting away with something, stealing daylight before someone somewhere realized what was going on, and aside from Bryan on top, nowhere did that feeling shine through more than the run these two had, the Rhodes family putting honest to god pro wrestling back on WWE television for half a year.

It was only six months, but I struggle to think of a better six months from any tag team all decade.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. The Shield, WWE (10/6/2013)
• vs. The Shield, WWE (10/14/2013)
• w/ John Cena vs. Damien Sandow/The Real Americans, WWE (11/1/2013)
• w/ CM Punk/Daniel Bryan/The Usos vs. The Shield/The Wyatt Family, WWE (11/18/2013)
• vs. The Shield, WWE (11/29/2013)
• vs. The Wyatt Family, WWE (1/3/2014)
• vs. The Real Americans, WWE (3/18/2014)

 

 

6. THE TWIN TOWERS (SHUJI ISHIKAWA & KOHEI SATO)

PREVIOUS: 3 (2015 & 2016)

 

Shuji Ishikawa and Kohei Sato assembled to create one of the decade’s great super teams, and in the process, helped each other take the leap from being good wrestlers into being two of the very best in the world.

Like a lot of team outside of the top five, there are weaknesses here that it only feels fair to admit.

The Twin Towers were a full time team for maybe two or three years at most (it gets murky as Ishikawa begins to branch out more), and in the first year of their union, there seem to be clear growing pains. I don’t think the team really truly clicks until their second year, when they begin regularly facing Sekimoto and Okabayashi regularly. On that note, you can also levy the same offense against them that you could against a lot of teams whose success came in one specific scene or period of time in one company, which is that the majority of their greatest work is against primarily the same guys. It’s not all that, of course. The beautiful spectacle match against Akebono and Ryota Hama, the match against underdogs Isami Kodaka & Yuko Miyamoto, or the more basic oriented matches against the Hideki Suzuki and baby Takuya Nomura team show that there’s some versatility and depth here. But their best work, and probably like half of their real great work together, does just so happen to come from one match up, and it happens to be against one of the only teams even higher than them on the list.

Having said all of that, shut the fuck up.

Ishikawa and Sato were what they were and achieved what they achieved, being half of maybe the best tag series of the decade should never be an indictment, and in their time together — including an occasional reunion — the Twin Towers were impossible to look away from.

Weird and awesome, as charming as they were violent, and totally undeniable.

Never forget.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Daisuke Sekimoto/Hideyoshi Kamitani, BJW (10/31/2014)
• vs. Strong BJ, BJW (5/28/2015)
• vs. Strong BJ, BJW (10/29/2015)
• vs. Akebono/Ryota Hama, BJW (7/24/2016)
• vs. Strong BJ, BJW (10/31/2016)
• vs. Strong BJ, BJW (1/2/2017)
• vs. Daisuke Sekimoto/Hideki Suzuki, BJW (1/2/2018)

 

 

5. THE KINGS OF WRESTLING (CHRIS HERO & CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI)

previous: 1 (2010), 3 (2011)

 

After the first twenty months of the decade, Hero and Claudio — under different names — only ever teamed once again.

They’re still the best super team, in the purest sense of the term, of the decade.

During the time that they were together, nobody touched them.

I wrote earlier that in 2010, the Motor City Machine Guns had one of the great individual tag team years of the decade, and they were still easily only the second best tag team of the year and in the world. The Young Bucks had an outstanding 2011, it was the year they really came into their own as the most obnoxious and annoying pieces of shit in the world. Had the Kings not split apart in the process of leaving the independents about halfway through the year (they essentially wrapped up in June, but teamed for a few farewell tags in August), they would have been second best that year too.

Hero and Claudio were that great together, and in that time, they were great at pretty much everything.

Great as an old style technique and bullshit heel team in ROH against the Briscoes, wildly impressive as young guns tricking people into thinking WGTT still had it, awesome as overmatched foreigners going for it against bigger heavyweights in NOAH, stellar as a prestige wrestling standard in dream matches against (real) LAX and MCMG, and really really really great as pure bullies against teams like Future Shock or ANX or Generico & London or the NVC. Hell, in their last match together on the independents against the Bucks in PWG, they even switched sides and absolutely killed it as ass kicking babyfaces. There’s not a role they tried to step into that I don’t think they pulled off, and not a style of match or narrative that they didn’t succeed with.

They have the peaks too. The street fight against The Briscoes is one of the best matches of the decade too, and a few other matches — against the Guns and against Peligro Abejas — aren’t far off either. Their time together is also made up of so many smaller successes in the middle or the undercards of ROH shows or episodes of HDNet, like an Up in Smoke match on a b-show that I absolutely love, and yet conceivably might not be a top ten or fifteen or twenty match the Kings had in their time together. I don’t mean to say they were bulletproof, nobody has a perfect resume, but in this second run as a team, the Kings felt as close to perfect as any team all decade.

For a year and a half, the Kings of Wrestling had immense volume, a few remarkable peaks, and the sort of versatility that ruins things for a lot of other tag teams. It is the ideal case for any tag team, the perfect resume, but for an upsettingly short period of time. I don’t know that any pure tag team — especially one on this level — made more of their time together than Hero and Castagnoli did. But it was still only a year and a half.

That’s why they’re “only” number five.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. MCMG, ROH (5/8/2010)
• vs. The Briscoes, ROH (6/19/2010)
• vs. Yoshihiro Takayama/Takuma Sano, NOAH (12/5/2010)
• vs. El Generico/Paul London, PWG (12/11/2010)
• vs. LAX (Homicide/Hernandez), ROH (3/19/2011)
• vs. The American Wolves, ROH (5/6/2011)
• vs. CM Punk/Seth Rollins, WWE (10/17/2012)

 

 

4. THE SHIELD (ROMAN REIGNS, DEAN AMBROSE, & SETH ROLLINS)

PREVIOUS: 1 (2013)

 

Of all the teams that got here on the strength of one run, something like a year and a half or less, these guys are, by a hair, the best of the bunch.

You might also be saying to yourself “well hey Simon, what about the reunions?”, to which I would say to shut up. By that point, the injury had stolen everything that made Rollins even sort of good at points, Ambrose had realized that there was no point in trying hard, and Reigns was effectively on an island as the only actively good wrestler on the team. There’s not a single great match in any of those reunion runs, but there also aren’t really any bad ones either. There are some good ones that aren’t quite there like the Cesaro mouth injury tag, and in the spirit of this, I like a lot of the 2014-2015ish Reigns/Ambrose TV tag work, but for the most part, it does not move the needle one way or the other, and The Shield’s placement here is about the one run.

And what a run.

The Shield was together, that first time for a little over a year and a half, and regularly teaming on television for like fourteen or fifteen months. In that time, they not only put together a stunning resume of great matches, including a handful of the best matches of the decade, but genuinely accomplished things. I don’t so much mean their growth or rise up the card, but more so the narrative quality of their entire run. The initial burst of nobody being able to beat them as a team leading to a b-show Smackdown main event feeling like one of the biggest things in the world when Bryan did, shooting him up the card in the process, the whole deal with the Rhodes family, the way the roles shifted around in their time together, all of that. The Shield not only has this insane list of great matches, an impressive display of volume and consistency, but relative to their environment (as in, yeah, there aren’t any bloodbaths or heavy brawls here exactly), there’s a lot of versatility too, in terms of how many different they did within the style.

It’s an impressive enough run as a team that, for like a year, I didn’t hate Seth Rollins. Like, holy shit man. Given that it was a default state since like 2005, given how quickly I went back to really disliking him as a wrestler as soon as they broke up, given that he really may be my least favorite wrestler of all time, The Shield briefly tricking me into thinking this guy had genuinely improved  is as much as a reason why they’re this high as any match is, if not more so.

There are probably things some of you might say, and I get that, but I have considered these arguments and they don’t hold a lot of weight, really.

Yeah, heir best work came largely in six man tags, and I had a problem with that for Dragon Gate teams earlier in the list, sure.

The difference is that there are also a lot of great Shield two-man tags, rather than a handful, and while most come from the Reigns/Rollins tag title run, the Ambrose combinations they explored more in their final six months together are really great too. Likewise, it would feel wrong not to also include Ambrose given that he was also often the best guy in the real high level six man tags.

Sure, also they were set up to succeed like no other WWE act all decade.

Not unfair. The big Roman set piece spots, the Rollins flying bits (which weirdly never seem to get called out despite being pretty much the same thing, in terms of only letting a future golden boy do what he’s good at), the amount of time they regularly got, the push, the level of opposition especially in terms of regular access to all-time greats like Cena or Goldust or especially Bryan, all of that. It’s not an incorrect argument, but look at how many other protected and pushed acts failed to deliver on the level that The Shield did in their initial time together. Look at other WWE teams with some opportunities and a far longer  tenure together who failed to achieve half of what The Shield did. Hell, look at what teams outside the walls did with far more freedom and experience. However you want to put it, there aren’t a lot of teams who were as great as The Shield.

The institutional support in all its forms has a lot to do with that, but at some point, I just don’t care anymore. Succeed a few times like that and it’s one thing, do it continually for a prolonged period of time, and it feels less like cheating and more like that ultra-rare instance of the machine working like it’s supposed to.

What happened happened, the record is the record, and only three teams all decade have a better one.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. John Cena/Team Hell No, WWE (5/13/2013)
• vs. Randy Orton/Team Hell No, WWE (6/3/2013)
• vs. Randy Orton/Team Hell No, WWE (6/14/2013)
• vs. Daniel Bryan/Dolph Ziggler/The Usos/Rob Van Dam/Kofi Kingston/R-Truth/Zack Ryder/Justin Gabriel, WWE (9/23/2013)
• (Rollins/Reigns) vs. Cody Rhodes/Goldust, WWE (10/14/2013)
• vs. The Wyatt Family, WWE (2/23/2014)
• vs. Evolution (5/4/2014)

 

 

3. STRONG BJ (DAISUKE SEKIMOTO & YUJI OKABAYASHI)

PREVIOUS: 2 (2011), 1 (2015), 2 (2016)

 

There are three teams this decade that I think totally and completely fit the criteria I want in terms of a Tag Team of the Decade, or really the winner of any of these wrestler/team specific awards. High peaks, at least some form of versatility to point to, considerable volume, and for the TTOTD list specifically, some longevity together.

Strong BJ are the clear third place team of those three for a few reasons.

Most obviously, unlike the other two (I trust you can figure them out at this point), they didn’t spend most of their time this decade teaming with each other. Daisuke Sekimoto and Yuji Okabayashi, being singles stars in their own right, did not constantly team together, so much as exist in the Big Japan tag division — regularly the best pure two-man tag division in the country all decade — throughout the majority of the 2010s after becoming a team in 2011. It puts them above almost every other tag team, but hurts them when things get real tough.

Okabayashi and Sekimoto — while still having a lot of different versions of the thing and narrative variations on the theme — pretty much always always had the same match, and when the other two left either had a few more deviations from their norm and also a greater volume or displayed far far greater versatility with even greater longevity, that matters a little bit.

That’s why they aren’t number one or number two.

However, in the same regard, they are a clear top three tag team of the decade for a lot of those same reasons.

The thing where they spent most of the decade, so long as neither was injured, tagging together really helps out when you can look at something from the second year of the decade and the last year of the decade and see the greatness in each. There aren’t a lot of tag teams with runs of greatness this long, and even if it wasn’t happening on every show, it still happened. It happened in their home base, it happened when they went into All Japan as invaders on three different occasions years apart, it happened in DDT, and hell, they were even great as two-thirds of a King of Trios team in CHIKARA in 2010. Sekimoto and Okabayashi were not a constant every day unit, but year over year over year, they were a picture of consistency.

As for that match they kept having?

That match whips so much God damned as.

Yeah, alright, they hit people hard and throw them on their heads, all of that. Not only did (and as of 2023, still do) they have a phenomenal command over how and why the best matches of that style work, but they found so many minor and major variations on that match together. Sometimes, the shifts were small, like working slightly more aggressive in All Japan against teams like Soya and Sanada in 2011 or Zeus and The Bodyguard in 2016, or how they worked against BJW’s own Kodaka/Miyamoto tandem. Sometimes, they were a little larger within those same confines, like their out and out bully work in their DDT run. Sometimes, they went even further with it, as seen in maybe the best tag team series of the entire decade against the Twin Towers, telling a multi-year story about the waning of Sekimoto’s prime, the hardest test they ever had, Okabayashi’s growth, and in their final outing, about Sekimoto finding the guts to pull through while now clearly past his prime.

It’s not wrong to say they had one kind of match, but Strong BJ spent the decade showing how much could be done within that style, and shining a light on the hundreds of very poor imitations.

Strong BJ land at number three because, in retrospect, it seems like the only place they ever could have landed. Devoted to the mastery of a specific style while also maintaining and growing their own careers, successful through attrition just as much as through focused effort, resulting in a vulgar display of power that was too obstinate to go any further and too beautiful to go any lower.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Manabu Soya/Seiya Sanada, AJPW (10/23/2011)
• vs. Akebono/Ryota Hama. AJPW (1/3/2012)
• vs. HARASHIMA/Yasu Urano, DDT (5/17/2015)
• vs. Twin Towers, BJW (5/28/2015)
• vs. Isami Kodaka/Yuko Miyamoto, BJW (10/31/2016)
• vs. The Big Guns (Zeus/The Bodyguard), AJPW (11/27/2016)
• vs. Twin Towers, BJW (1/2/2017)

 

 

2. THE BRISCOES

PREVIOUS: 5 (2011 & 2012), 3 (2014), 2 (2015), 5 (2018)

 

“JOHN KRONUS”, “VIOLENT PEOPLE”, “In the back, in the cut, just trying to look at some titties.”

The great thing about The Briscoes is that I think this blurb could just be a few transcribed paragraphs from Briscoes promos and I feel like, even though I have stated time and time again that these are like 95% based on in-ring output, you would all totally get it.

But the greatest tag team of all time deserves more, so let’s get into it.

Longevity?

The Briscoes are one of a few tag teams this decade that never stopped teaming, so long as both were healthy. Even when Jay Briscoe was the ROH World Champion, the b-shows and episodes of ROH Wrestling regularly featured Briscoes matches. Beyond just pure numbers, all ten of those years are good. ROH being ROH, they didn’t always utilize the Briscoes super well, but every time they got to face another even half-decent tag team, it resulted in a great match, which also resulted in a whole lot of volume. Even at number two, I still believe The Briscoes were the most purely consistent tag team of the decade, because the level of performance never waivered.

Peaks?

Sure, kind of. Obviously, the majority of the material someone might put on a Best of The Briscoes comp comes in the 2000s when they were, I am 99% sure, the Tag Team of the Decade (side note: name another time the previous decade’s best tag team was a top five tag team in the next decade. Whoever you have in the 80s or 90s isn’t doing it, the Bucks sure aren’t doing it in the 2020s, etc.). The absolute peaks of their career come arguably before and after this decade. But when given the opportunity and opposition — such as the Kings of Wrestling street fight in 2010 or the Young Bucks pay-per-view match in 2018 — The Briscoes were just as capable of producing all-decade level work as anyone, if not more. They didn’t have the material to achieve it all the time, but still achieved some truly incredible things, like what they did with lesser ROH projects like The Kingdom or the All Night Express, which I found maybe just as impressive as any number of great matches against teams that had great matches far more consistently.

Versatility?

Jay and Mark have that maybe more than anyone. They started the decade starting to transition away from being a pure fireworks team, but still having aspects of that, and ended it as the best brawling tag team in the world. They had great stunt shows, incredible brawls, great heel performance, great babyface performances, great pay-per-view matches, great television matches, great matches elevating young heels, great matches elevating young babyfaces, great matches against older teams, great matches in control, great matches from underneath, you name it. The Briscoes looked as at home against the Buck or TimeSplitters or Roppongi Vice in ROH as they did as part of a Rush vs. L.A. Park six man in Arena Mexico, and while they are only number two, I can’t think of any other tag team all decade who I would say that about.

They have it all, and the only reason that they’re not the Tag Team of the Decade (again) is that they were let down by their environment in a way that number one wasn’t, or at least not to the same extent. Or, to put it another way, it’s not because of anything they lack, but because of something someone else has.

Still, there is maybe no truer proof of the greatness of the Briscoes than the decade they had here. They are not number one, but it’s a stunning thing that in a decade that most consider to be them past their prime, suffering under lazy and/or boring booking which often saw them as not a focal point in the last half of the decade, they‘re still the second best tag team of the entire decade. 

Man up.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. The Kings of Wrestling, ROH (6/19/2010)
• vs. The Hardy Boyz, OMEGA (4/26/2014)
• vs. Matt Sydal/ACH, ROH (1/31/2015)
• vs. Kenny Omega/Adam Cole, ROH/NJPW (2/26/2017)
• vs. Ringkampf, WXW (10/6/2017)
• vs. The Young Bucks, ROH (6/29/2018)
• w/ Rush vs. L.A. Park/Lucha Brothers, CMLL (8/3/2018)

 

 

 

1. THE YOUNG BUCKS

PREVIOUS: 3 (2010), 1 (2011 & 2012), 2 (2013), 1 (2014), 4 (2015), 5 (2016), 4 (2017), 1 (2018)

 

I‘m not the biggest Young Bucks fan in the world.

You can find many glowing reviews of their work on this site, but in the last half of the decade, I had a lot to criticize. They got far too into themselves around 2016 and forgot just how and why the act worked like it did, supported by thousands of the most annoying people alive who somehow viewed them as heroes. They fell off a cliff after a brief return to form in 2018 and never really found a way to translate their better qualities onto mainstream U.S. television. They are some of the most annoying people alive, and when they forget that or work against it, it results in wrestling that is just as annoying. 

But what else was ever going to happen here?

The Bucks weren’t only together for the entire decade, but they were producing good wrestling for most of the decade and in environments that played to their strengths for most of the decade. The idea of Peak PWG was built, in part, around what the Young Bucks’ strengths were at their best. New Japan maybe never let them go wild outside of U.S. shows, but constantly put them in great situations. ROH basically became the Young Bucks (& Friends) show from 2016 through 2018 once they realized their own political power, which was not always to their benefit artistically, but more often than not saw them get the platform and opposition to succeed with on major events.

It’s a boring pick to me because I think everyone always knew that this is how it would end up. The decade is less dramatic than individual years in this sense maybe, because I’ve spent all these years sort of showing you who is going to win. Even as someone more ambivalent to the Bucks in the last half of the decade, there’s just too much to deny. I thought about it, but it felt dishonest, just because I don’t like them. The versatility isn’t there so much maybe, but they have pretty much everything else over pretty much everybody else.

You want peaks?

Alright.

They have them. More than anyone. Like, it’s not close. The Young Bucks are half of my favorite tag team match of the decade, and a few more than that too. The Briscoes, the Machine Guns, the TimeSplitters, NVC, Future Shock, the Smash Brothers, the Dojo Bros, and that’s just the teams on this list, nevermind the dozens and dozens and maybe hundreds outside of that.

You want longevity? Check that PREVIOUSLY ON line underneath the title. Not only were they the Tag Team of the Year four times, nearly half the decade, but they made the top five for 90% of the decade. Even in some of those years I spoke about above where they lost sight of themselves and leaned on bits, they were still capable of a few annual shows of what they were still capable of. Their first great match of the decade came in February 2010 against an El Generico/Chuck Taylor tag team in PWG. Their last came in December 2019 against Santana and Ortiz, which happened to come about on one of the early episodes of a mainstream cable TV wrestling show for a company they were at least partially responsible for getting off of the ground. The only other team that stacks up to that longevity is the team in second place, who has not only lower peaks, but fewer of them as well.

I don’t love it, and it doesn’t feel great, but I see no point in lying. The Young Bucks are the Tag Team of the Decade.

The only solace I take is that in the last year of the decade, the Young Bucks fell right back off and showed why they’ll probably never be on another Tag Team of the [x] list moving forward chronologically.

Small mercies.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• vs. Kevin Steen/Super Dragon, PWG (12/10/2011)
• vs. Kevin Steen/El Generico, PWG (1/12/2013)
• vs. The TimeSplitters, NJPW (6/21/2014)
• vs. Candice LeRae, PWG (7/26/2014)
• w/ Super Dragon vs. Biff Busick/Trevor Lee/Andrew Everett, PWG (8/29/2015)
• vs. The Golden Lovers, NJPW (3/25/2018)
• vs. The Briscoes, ROH (6/29/2018)

 

 

 

 

PROMOTION OF THE DECADE:

 

So, in doing THE DECADE IN LISTS, my idea was to just make all of the usual categories a little bigger.

While it presented problems due to choice a lot of the time, what I didn’t really consider was that there weren’t actually that many promotions. I got ten, and even then, five is the perfect number for the decade just like it is for the annual pieces. The back half of the list is all flawed in one way or another, and it got dire enough that I considered putting the WWE at number nine or ten before remembering all of the truly wretched shit on the other side of the ledger from all the great shit.

But a promise is a promise, and so here are the top ten, and the others I at least considered. 

 

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

• CWF Mid-Atlantic
• PROGRESS
• Sendai Girls
• WWE

 

 

10. BATTLARTS/FUTEN [TIE]

PREVIOUS: 3 (2010) [FUTEN]

 

They are technically separate promotions. If you get a little deeper into it, there is something of a divide, with FUTEN being a little harder and more striking oriented, as would befit its central figure, much in the same way that BattlARTS’ slightly more scientific (but still violent) styles matches that of its founder.

But you know what, fuck it man, there is no reason to split hairs here.

FUTEN and BattlARTS are both relics of a more wonderful age that by the middle of the decade will have ceased to exist. FUTEN more and more before a final show in 2015, while BattlARTS had an official end in 2011 while still fairly active. In their years in existence earlier in the decade, there was little other wrestling that was as watchable as these promotions. Not just in terms of the pure highlights, but entire shows. You could fire up a BattlARTS or FUTEN show, watch the entire thing, and maybe not love all of it, but be entertained by most of it, and wind up with at least one great match by the end.

In the spirit of these promotions, I will keep it as brief as is necessary. They ruled, they were realer than everything else, and wrestling is a million times worse without them.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• Daisuke Ikeda vs. Takeshi Ono, FUTEN (9/26/2010)
• Daisuke Ikeda/Takehiro Oba vs. Kengo Mashimo/Makoto Hashi, FUTEN (10/24/2010)
• Yuki Ishikawa vs. Munenori Sawa, BattlARTS (6/19/2011)
• Yuki Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda, BattlARTS (11/5/2011)
• Daisuke Ikeda/Takeshi Ono vs. Kengo Mashimo/Hikaru Sato, FUTEN (1/22/2012)

 

9. LUCHA UNDERGROUND

 

Unlike the last entry, this is not a clean case.

By the end of its fourth and final season, Lucha Underground fell completely off of the rails. Hell, it did that by the end of its third season. Focusing the show around the most boring ex-WWE guys imaginable, getting way way way way too into the lore and the bullshit and the TV writing, revealing that the people in charge never really knew why it was that the first two or two and a half seasons worked like they did.

That’s why it only lands at number nine, because truly, those first two seasons or so are unbelievable, and unlike almost anything else.

More than the bullshit — although much of the early bullshit was also a delight — Lucha Underground worked because it combined all of these incredibly cool wrestlers with the narrative framework and television editing needed to make the absolute most out of all of their gifts. Flawed wrestlers like Fenix and Penta El 0M (Pentagon Jr.) were either put with blood and guts veterans like El Mesias or Vampiro respectively in matches with all of the stuff on the sides and on the top to make the most of their natural gifts, cutting out everything that didn’t work. All-world athletes were put against each other in increasingly fantastical scenarios, such as throwing Io Shirai out there to go wild, the King Cuerno run, Drago and Aerostar and Fenix, or putting AR Fox and Swerve Strickland under new identities and giving them a green light like never before. More limited guys like a Ricochet were put under a mask and with the help of careful booking, led to a near career level run, with miracles like great Big Ryck or Hernandez solo outings becoming common place.

Everything came together most perfectly for the first two Aztec Warfare matches, the two greatest Rumble style matches of the decade, showing the complete breadth of what Lucha Underground was capable of when all the parts of the machine worked right.

It wasn’t always perfect and it certainly didn’t last, but there were few more exhilarating runs anywhere in wrestling all decade.

The fact that it was all done with Matt Striker on the call only makes it that much more impressive.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• Aztec Warfare I (1/7/2015)
• Fenix vs. Mil Muertes (3/18/2015)
• Pentagon Jr. vs. Vampiro (8/5/2015)
• Fenix vs. Mil Muertes (3/16/2016)
• Pentagon Black vs. Io Shirai/Kairi Hojo/Mayu Iwatani (11/30/2016)
• Dante Fox (AR Fox) vs. Killshot (Swerve Strickland) (9/27/2017)

 

 

8. WESTSIDE XTREME WRESTLING

PREVIOUS: 2 (2017 & 2018)

 

CWF Mid-Atlantic wound up on the honorable mention chart, the last one cut, but they and WXW out of Germany did a lot of the same things right.

Especially once WXW got their Shotgun program running, the two best independent promotions in the world for a few years had a lot in common. Anchored by a few all world talents (Trevor Lee, Ringkampf), utilizing episodic weekly programming to help get over stories and characters with younger or less skilled talent, frequently overly ambitious in what they tried to do, but effective because they committed to their bits and threw their hearts out there in front of the world.

The advantage WXW has is that unlike CWF’s few years of being great, WXW was great for a year or so longer in either direction, while also being genuinely good all throughout the decade.

Before the entire promotion really began to click, the first few years of WXW in the 2010s plays host to a lot of my favorite wrestling of the decade. Baby Walter vs. Hero in the Carat finals, the Switchblade Conspiracy run in that same tournament, Zack Sabre Jr. coming into his own, the tour de force that was the 2016 Carat Gold tournament, Zack vs. Walter clicking, the magical AUTsiders vs. Hot & Spicy match, and a bunch of other great little matches. WXW, even before it all clicked, had immense value as both the home of the Carat weekend, producing matches available nowhere else in the world, but also as the place where Zack Sabre Jr. and WALTER wrestled, before British wrestling broke out and before WALTER began going everywhere.

When the company did pull it together, the only thing stopping it from being the best wrestling promotion in the world was the Great Match Factory operating at an enormously high level again. Even then, what they did is genuinely impressive. Things like the brief success of Bobby Gunns, Bad Bones becoming a very good wrestler, Absolute Andy aka TRIPLE H ON THE RHINE, the ascent of Ilja Dragunov, and the Ringkampf split. The strength of WXW in these years lies in the fact that I think of characters and of stories just as much as I do matches, the hallmark of a truly great wrestling promotion, rather than just a place where great matches are held.

WXW’s peak lasted two years before they have into the tidal wave of cowardice that also claimed their greatest wrestler, but those twoto three years were genuinely a magical and wonderful time that I’m going to remember for a very long time.

V IX V forever.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• Switchblade Conspiracy vs. The Young Bucks (3/6/2010)
• Big Van Walter vs. Sami Callihan (3/13/2011)
• The AUTsiders vs. Hot & Spicy (11/16/2013)
• WALTER vs. Ilja Dragunov (3/12/2017)
• WALTER vs. John Klinger vs. Ilja Dragunov (3/10/2018)
• Timothy Thatcher vs. Yuki Ishikawa (3/8/2019)

 

 

7. BIG JAPAN WRESTLING

PREVIOUS: 3 (2012), 4 (2019)

 

Big Japan was, is, and probably always will be incredibly frustrating.

For the much of the last twenty years, Big Japan has had many of the best wrestlers in the world. They have had the best regular tag division in the country for a very long time (mostly through incompetency elsewhere, to be fair), retained the majority of their great talent, and through sheer inertia, regularly put on great wrestling matches. They also occasionally break out a ring mat with a not great flag, have a lot of fairly routine deathmatches, and often take forever to do anything.

The latter is also sometimes their greatest strength.

More than many other promotions this decade — and into the next — Big Japan nailed its major moments perfectly. Things like Okabayashi finally taking the torch from Sekimoto in the middle of the decade, Strong BJ taking down the Twin Towers, the astonishingly slow elevation of the Astronauts despite their quick ascent to greatness, and especially the coronation of Yoshihito Sasaki, they all landed with so much more force and feeling because of how withholding Big Japan can often be. The last of those is the greatest ever example of that, I think, resulting in maybe both the best ever singles match and best ever moment in company history.

For as dull as a lot of the cards can often be, few promotions had the moments like Big Japan did, and they had them consistently. Few promotions also, year after year after year, delivered the hits like they did. Not everything was a strong division epic, as seen in the stellar Deathmatch Title reigns of Shuji Ishikawa or Masashi Takeda or the Strong vs. Death runs in the tag league usually involving Kodaka and Miyamoto, but the hits were always there.

More than any other promotion in the top ten, as one I do not feel that strongly for outside of a few individual moments they hosted, Big Japan succeeds like its two greatest wrestlers did, through a kind of casual force of talent and pure attrition.

 

RECOMMNENDED MATCHES:

• Necro Butcher vs. Yoshihito Sasaki (6/25/2010)
• Daisuke Sekimoto vs. Yoshihito Sasaki (3/26/2012)
• Shuji Ishikawa vs. Masashi Takeda (6/30/2013)
• Strong BJ vs. Twin Towers (5/28/2015)
• Yuji Okabayashi vs. Ryota Hama (1/24/2016)
• Yuji Okabayashi vs. Takuya Nomura (7/21/2019)

 

 

6. EVOLVE/DGUSA/WWN

PREVIOUS: 4 (2015 & 2016) [EVOLVE]

 

Like FUTEN and BattlARTS, again, who are we kidding? Basically the same promotion.

I say that because as much as many of you know I love Peak EVOLVE aka The Grapplefuck Era, there is also a little more to this.

Dragon Gate USA, mostly, was pretty good. Not always for the Japanese talents, although the real standouts like Shingo and Yoshino always showed up with a respectable effort, but as another promotion in general. Ricochet and AR Fox were great, Gargano had career-level work as a focal point babyface against guys like Shingo and Chuck Taylor and Jon Davis (before it was ruined with a dirt rotten heel run), and earlier in the decade and more under the radar, Jon Moxley had the first all-time level work of his career against Homicide and in the feud-ender I Quit match against Jimmy Jacobs that’s among the best of the decade.

Mostly though, yeah, it is Peak EVOLVE.

In 2014, something kind of magical happened.

For whatever reason, in the late summer and early fall of 2014, Gabe Sapolsky had the bright idea to reorient his remaining company (DGUSA was effectively over by then) around the rising tide of the superior style of guys like Drew Gulak, Biff Busick, Timothy Thatcher, and Zack Sabre Jr., along with the returning Chris Hero, and presented a more scientifically focused wrestling promotion than had existed in some time. For the real sickos like myself and maybe you The Reader, it was a godsend. GRAPPLEFUCK emerged, many of the most annoying people in the world were mad for a very long time, and there was a promotion just for us.

Wrestlers like Roderick Strong, Trevor Lee, Mike Bailey, Jeff Cobb, ACH, Tracy Williams, Fred Yehi, Darby Allin, TJP, a young and not-yet-ruined Matt Riddle and the like joined in, and for a few years, there was no surer bet on U.S. soil than an EVOLVE live ticket or VOD. It isn’t so much the home to all-decade material at the rate of one of the Great Match Factories, but these cards were like 80% filled with the sort of meat and potatoes pro wrestling that the indies had been missing for a very very long time. It was a significant part of what, in the middle of the decade, got me back into regularly following independent wrestling, and while imperfect, led not only to many of my favorite viewing experiences of the decade, but also led me to first talking to a lot of the people I really like talking to about wrestling still all these years later.

Unfortunately, it could not last.

Or rather, it could not last in hands this unsteady.

That other 20% — the part that somehow got Gabe to book a 20:00+ minute Thatcher vs. Caleb Konley title match, Ethan Page, Tony Nese, Austin Theory, etc. — is why, along with Gabe abandoning it before the end of the decade to hop on the teat and become a WWE develpmental sub-brand, the entire group is only number six. Not only was it the premature destruction of something unique and beautiful, but it was deeply and incredibly shameful as well, as every rebrand resulted in an even steeper decline in interest, leading to EVOLVE no longer existing.

Some things, especially given their audience, are simply too good to last.

We’ll always have Ybor City.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• Jon Moxley vs. Jimmy Jacobs (10/29/2010)
• Fit Finlay vs. Sami Callihan (7/26/2011)
• Chris Hero vs. Timothy Thatcher (3/28/2015)
• Biff Busick vs. Timothy Thatcher (8/16/2015)
• Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Drew Gulak (11/13/2016)
• Kassuius Ohno vs. Darby Allin (12/15/2018)

 

 

5. RING OF HONOR

PREVIOUS: 3 (2014), 1 (2015)

 

Like Big Japan, ROH’s decade is deeply frustrating.

Ring of Honor was an insane company to try and follow this decade.

From the Adam Pearce days to the early Sinclair/Cornette era to the Delirious run in the last seven years in all of its many sub-eras, ROH never entirely made sense. It was always the host to good-to-great pro wrestling, always the host to at least some of the best wrestlers in the world, and in one way or another, always seemed to try and get in their way.

The thing is though, as ROH proves in any number of ways — from people leaving to see greater success elsewhere or the promotional apparatus itself eventually giving way — the cream does eventually rise up to the top.

More often throughout the decade than not, ROH hosted wrestling that was just too great to ignore.

In large part, that came down to the sheer might of the roster for its first six or seven years before people began to leave. Roddy, The Briscoes, Jay Lethal on the run of his life that has never translated outside of ROH, the best Cole work ever, Kyle O’Reilly, ACH, Cedric, the Sydal return run, the two year AJ Styles walkabout, Steen, Generico, Jacobs, The Young Bucks, Lio Rush, Dalton Castle (specifically the Silas Young feud in which Silas wanted to fuck the gay out of Castle and his Boys), Ciampa, Eddie Edwards, and so many others. It maybe didn’t work perfectly, this is not the Midas touch of 2000s ROH, but for the majority of the decade, the talent managed to carry the company on a level like few other promotions all decade.

ROH was the company that, in what I called the best wrestling year of the decade, won Promotion of the Year, just as much as it was borderline unwatchable for the last few years of the decade, and maybe a third of the decade total. More than maybe any other promotion all decade, ROH contained multitudes. So many multitudes.

And also, yeah, 2010s ROH booked a satisfying conclusion to Jimmy Loves Lacey seven years later, and I am always going to give them the slightest benefit of the doubt for that.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• Kevin Steen/Steve Corino vs. El Generico/Colt Cabana (4/24/2010)
• The Kings of Wrestling vs. The Briscoes (6/19/2010)
• AJ Styles/The Young Bucks/Guns & Gallows vs. Roderick Strong/The Briscoes/War Machine (5/15/2015)
• Jay Briscoe vs. Jay Lethal (6/19/2015)
• Jay Lethal vs. Lio Rush (4/1/2016)
• The Briscoes vs. The Young Bucks (6/29/2018)

 

 

4. DRAGON GATE

previous: 3 (2011), 4 (2012), 3 (2014), 1 (2016), 5 (2017)

 

Almost as equally frustrating as Ring of Honor  — even at its best, Dragon Gate frequently seemed to go out of its way to say that it would never entirely be For Me — but with more consistent and higher highs.

The easy thing to start with is the Big Six, but it is not just about them. The Millennials were a blast, there are so many fun rookies (super rookie Takehiro Yamamura forever, the greatest What If? of the decade) and there are so many great veteran performances all decade from guys like Ryo Saito, K-Ness, CIMA, Super Shisa, Don Fujii, Dragon Kid, and the like. There are also so many really wonderful foreigner runs to be seen here. Most notably with Ricochet and the two PAC runs at the beginning and end of the decade, but also with guys like Flamita or brief Matt Sydal returns. 

Primarily though, yeah, it is about the Big Six.

At least for the first seven or eight years, this company lives upon the success of the generation that begins to inherit the Earth at the start of the decade. Masato Yoshino, YAMATO, Shingo Takagi, Naruki Doi, Akira Tozawa, and BxB Hulk. The bulk of the major DG successes all decade happened between these six. The all-time company singles meetings in Shingo/Hulk and Shingo/Tozawa. Yoshino’s run of all-time Dream Gate matches against YAMATO and Takagi. The various tag runs among the group, two of which landed on the Tag Team of the Decade list. Roughly a million great tag team matches in all types of different combinations, all throughout the majority of the decade.

Beyond the specific Cena/Punk/Lesnar round robin in the first few years of the decade in the WWE and maybe New Japan’s initial iteration of the Big Three, there may not be a better series among a collection of talent, nor a pure collection of talent.

Dragon Gate certainly had its problems, many of which you can easily read about on this very site, but when they hit and struck true, there was little else like it in the world. Likeable wrestlers succeeding in broad overarching short and long term stories, armed with some of the most sensational fireworks around.

Warts and all, it’s hard to get much better than that.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• YAMATO vs. Masato Yoshino (10/10/2013)
• Masato Yoshino vs. T-Hawk (11/7/2013)
• Amigo Tag vs. Jimmy Susumu/Jimmy Kagetora (4/9/2015)
• Jimmyz vs. MAD BLANKEY (8/16/2015)
• VerserK vs. Monster Express (10/12/2016)
• T-Hawk vs. Takehiro Yamamura (4/7/2017)

 

 

3. DRAMATIC DREAM TEAM

PREVIOUS: 4 (2011), 2 (2014), 5 (2015), 2 (2016), 3 (2017 & 2018), 1 (2019)

 

DDT is fucking weird, man.

I almost don’t know how to write about it.

To be clear, I do not mean that in the boring way that people often do, focusing on the comedy first, or any of that. I primarily mean that over the course of the decade, DDT changed a whole lot, experimented constantly for most of the decade, before seemingly making a conscious decision by the end — and far far more so in the 2020s — to become a much less interesting promotion.

It’s still a promotion with so much to love, especially before that transition closer to something like normalcy in the last few years

DDT’s decade begins with a Sekimoto invasion run on top, and over the next seven or eight, sees the HARASHIMA establishment as The Ace, Hikaru Sato getting a turn, the all-time fun Dick Togo retirement tour, KUDO getting his due, Omega and Ibushi, freaks like Yuji Hino and Shuji Ishikawa on top, one of the great long-term rivalries of the decade in HARASHIMA vs. Shigehiro Irie, failsons, weird pervert, and even a brief Meiko Satomura title run. Independent of the main title, if you can imagine it, it almost definitely happened in DDT.

The joy here comes from just how much there was to offer.

So many promotions seem to promise the old three ring circus, but DDT comes maybe the closest to truly delivering it. Lip service is paid to the idea elsewhere, but in DDT this decade, you can have your outdoor matches and then the real wrestling. Fireworks being shoved up a man’s asshole and also world class pro wrestling, sometimes even in the same match. The silliest nonsense around, and at the same time, a decade largely dominated also by one of the great Ace runs in recent wrestling history.

DDT was the biggest tent in wrestling in the 2010s, and like it or not, it may have been the only promotion to say wrestling was for everyone and truly mean it.

It’s hard not to respect that.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• Dick Togo vs. Antonio Honda (1/30/2011)
• Kota Ibushi vs. El Generico (9/30/2012)
• HARASHIMA vs. KUDO (5/31/2015)
• Shuji Ishikawa vs. HARASHIMA (12/4/2016)
• Konosuke Takeshita vs. Masashi Takeda vs. Kazusada Higuchi vs. MAO (7/3/2018)
• Konosuke Takeshita vs. HARASHIMA (11/3/2019)

 

 

2. PRO WRESTLING GUERRILLA

PREVIOUS: 2 (2010), 1 (2011), 2 (2012), 4 (2013 & 2014), 3 (2015)

 

Of course, right?

For the first half of the decade, and a little more, a PWG show was one of the surest bets in all of pro wrestling. You have, at this point, read in passing about a significant amount of the great wrestling hosted in these golden years.

More importantly than that, for the majority of the decade, I believe that PWG represented something culturally. Maybe not as obviously as like Attitude Era WWF, but PWG in the early part of this decade especially always felt very much like a promotion representative of its time and place in a way very few wrestling promotions have ever been.

As much as Ring of Honor summed up the Bush years (everything lasts forever, incredibly self serious, deeply stupid, puts forth a pretense of legitimacy while so much of the real important stuff is pure grit and violence) and GCW perfectly sums up the Trump years (outwardly cheap, devoid of most value, repetitive to the point of a numbing effect, enables and gives voices the worst aspects of Our Thing — both America and indie wrestling), PWG is the independent wrestling of the Obama years. It’s light, breezy, a little offensive but in a sort of sitcom-y way, it’s positive without shouting about how positive it is but also making sure you know it, and in retrospect, it ruined the brains of a lot of people until 2015 or 2016. Myself included! At the time, it felt like this celebration, that a great evil had been maybe not defeated, but contained and humiliated to such an extent that certain beliefs and opinions were okay just to laugh at, because nobody could possibly be taking them seriously anymore.

Mostly, it’s this idea that the right things were not only happening all on their own, but that they would continue, because they had so far.

In retrospect, it’s no surprise that The Young Bucks eventually got everything they could ever hope for, given that the grand climax of PWG’s banner year (2011) is an even greater evil returning, being whitewashed, and helping our Problematic Fav Kevin Steen humiliate, dominate, defeat, but never quite banish these little psycho church boys gone mad. As much as ROH was sometimes embarrassingly self serious, and GCW is embarrassingly and almost proudly hollow, Peak PWG is something somewhere in between. The self confidence to know that despite often saying differently, this was not THAT serious. The ability to get there on a dime when the situation called for it, because of the brain damage we all suffered in the previous era but agreed to mostly ignore after the way it all ended. Fun as hell, but the idea of fun as a marketing concept beyond that, when most everything else was so much stupider in so many different ways.

PWG succeeded in its time (2006-2015) because of how little it asked of you as a viewer, and how much it delivere. Watch a PWG show. Have a good time. That’s it. A victory lap, both earned and also preemptive, for all the right things, held in perpetuity, unconcerned with its slower decline until such a time when the bottom entirely dropped out (2016).

At no point did that victory feel more assured outside of than in this period from 2011 through late 2015. It’s almost too coincidental that this lines up almost perfectly with what I’d perceive to be Peak PWG, but it lines up too perfectly to mean nothing.

PWG is, for sure, the American promotion of the decade because it most resembles America this decade, but there is still one wrestling promotion clearly and obviously better, and everyone reading this knows it.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• Chris Hero vs. Akira Tozawa (9/5/2010)
• The Young Bucks vs. Kevin Steen/Super Dragon (12/10/2011)
• The Young Bucks vs. Kevin Steen/El Generico (1/12/2013)
• Trevor Lee vs. Mike Bailey (4/3/2015)
• Roderick Strong vs. Mike Bailey (6/26/2015)
• Chuck Taylor vs. Zack Sabre Jr. (7/7/2017)

 

 

1. NEW JAPAN PRO WRESTLING

previous: 5 (2011), 1 (2012, 2013, 2014), 2 (2015), 1 (2017 & 2018)

 

What else was it going to be?

They were literally the promotion of the year for half of the decade, and with all due respect, no other promotion won it more than once.

New Japan, the Great Match Factory, delivers perhaps its greatest overall decade of production ever.

It’s a real circus of a company at its best. The three ring idea, put to its greatest utility all decade. If you don’t like this, there’s that, or this third or fourth or fifth thing. I can’t imagine someone watching Peak New Japan (2013-5) and not being able to find something they really loved, and for a majority of people, there was so much to love. Even in its second, somewhat lesser, peak (2017-18), there’s so much for everyone to like. Heavyweight epics with years of build up and hyper-emotional payoffs, dudes rock slugfests, big dumb junior tags, something like KUSHIDA vs. Hiromu that gives you all the cool moves but with real substance behind it, almost the entire spectrum of things I like in wrestling outside of uncontrollable brawls, it all exists in New Japan at one point or another this decade.

The tricky thing here is that, as I‘ve grown older, I’ve realized something about wrestling and about this sort of category specifically. For promotion with a truly mainstream sort of a budget, so long as the focus is in the right place — on producing good professional wrestling — it is very hard for too many things to go astray. Like, if the WWE ever truly devoted themselves to the task, with the things that their budget can afford them between production quality and presentation and the ability to recruit and pay for all-time level talent rosters, they would be a fair bet to win Promotion of the Year every year. The one twelve month period this decade when they even accidentally wound up half having this goal (Spring 2013 to Spring 2014), they would have won it if not for their other impulses. For the majority of the existence of WCW as an entity, in the years when things went right (89-90, 92-94, 96-97), the same applies. The best year of AEW (2021) or Peak NOAH a decade prior or Peak All Japan two or three decades prior works under the same idea.

Generally speaking, if a promotion with resources and budget to sign enough of the best wrestlers alive devotes itself towards good wrestling, even if I don’t always agree on what the exact definition of that is all the time, it is harder for them to not be the Promotion of the Year than for them to achieve this. For a large chunk of the decade, too much so to be ignored, that was New Japan, and unlike maybe in decades past, it really is just that simple.

It’s boring, again, but anything else would just be a lie.

 

RECOMMENDED MATCHES:

• Kazuchika Okada vs. Tetsuya Naito (3/4/2012)
• Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Minoru Suzuki (10/8/2012)
• Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Kazushi Sakuraba (1/4/2013)
• Katsuyori Shibata vs. Tomohiro Ishii (8/4/2013)
• Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Tomohiro Ishii (8/1/2015)
• Kazuchika Okada vs. Kenny Omega (6/11/2017)

 

If you read all of this, thank you. We are only really one-third done, so I am not going to do the whole thing yet, but this was not a short piece, and I do appreciate it. Should you want to say thank you or commission a piece of writing, head over to the ko-fi, because nothing says I appreciate you quite like money. The top one-hundred matches of the year will be coming next.