The Best Wrestlers of 2018 - Your Rankings!

Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the nominations thread for the 2018 PWF50!

What's the PWF50 you say? The PWF50 is THE list of the 50 best pro-wrestling "acts" of 2018 across all promotions, according to you, the members of PWF.

How is "best" defined? Well that's entirely up to you! Be it money on the mic, in the ring or at the box office this is about what and who YOU enjoyed the most, for whatever reason!

Here's how it works:
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1. Each member of PWF can put forwards a list of up to 25 "acts".
2. Your list should be numbered, with number one being the act you consider to be the best in wrestling, number two the second best and so on.
3. The act you rank number one on your list will score 25 points, number two will score 24 points and so on.
4. You do not have to put forwards a list with 25 names, however the amount of points your number one pick can achieve is the number of nominations on the list you do put forwards. (i.e, if your list has ten names, your number one pick will only get 10 points, number two will get 9 and so on).
5. This year counts as January 1st 2018 up until the closing date for nominations.
6. Single wrestlers, tag-teams, factions and managers are all considered an "act" and can all be nominated. However:
7. Nominating a tag-team is a nomination for just that tag-team, not the individual members within it. Likewise nominating the individual members of a tag-team separately will not count towards the score for the tag-team they are in. The same goes for factions. (for example, nominating Adam Cole would score points only for Adam Cole, not the Undesputed Era, likewise nominating the Undisputed Era will not score points for Adam Cole.)
8. You should list your nominations in this thread.
9. The nomination period will end on Saturday 15th December, at which point I will collate all of the points scored from our nominations into a single list representing what we, the members of PWF, consider to be the 50 greatest wrestling acts of 2018.

The aim of this list is about two things:

1. Creating discussion.
2. Creating a list that is representative of our opinions as a forum.

So please, don't just post a numbered list, expand on and explain some of your nominations!

Have fun everyone!

 

No thoughts so far?

Some stats from the decade I ran this somewhere else to get the thoughts flowing (Obviously these results come from a completely different group of people, but they make interesting reading nonetheless and it will be interesting to compare the previous results from another website to what the members here come up with).

The TWF50 (as it then was) ran for ten straight years. The first years list was lost due to a server change however it is known that this years rankings (2007) was topped by CM Punk. Of the nine years where records are available, five people managed to claim the number one spot. "The Best At What He Does" Chris Jericho went back to back to top the rankings in 2008 and 2009. Daniel Bryan topped it twice, once in 2010 and again in 2013. In 2011 and 2012 CM Punk claimed back to back number one spots to become the only person to top the rankings three times. In 2014 and 2016 AJ Styles took the honours with the intervening year (2015) belonging to Seth Rollins.

The only man to appear in all nine (recorded) years rankings was AJ Styles. When I converted all of the recorded years rankings to points using the same system we use for the (now) PWF50 AJ Styles also topped that Best of the Decade rankings. In that "Best of the Decade" list, the highest placed tag-team was the New Day, though the Motor City Machine Guns are the highest placed tag-team in a single years listing after they came in at third spot in 2010.

The highest overall placed female for the decade was Bayley, mainly due to being the highest ever placed female in a single years ranking when she placed 2nd overall wrestler of the year in 2015.

For those interested, here are the top 15 wrestlers of 2008 - 2017 according to the people that voted on those years rankings (Name - Total Score From All Recorded Rankings - Number of Appearances - Average Points Per Appearance [50 points = #1 spot]):

* should also note that wrestlers names were updated as we went, so Cesaro also clocked up points as Claudio Castagnoli, Seth Rollins as Tyler Black and so on.

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Styles, Bryan and Punk are not the top 3 wrestlers this decade.

Rollins and Owens shouldn't be on that list either.

 

AJ Styles has been the top champion in TNA, New Japan and WWE over the past decade.

WWE signed him as a mid-carder and ended up putting their top title on him for over a year.

Daniel Bryan was, until WWE and injury ruined his momentum, the most organically popular wrestler we've seen since Austin, and Punks pipebomb very almost took wrestling mainstream again.

All three of these men put on more entertaining wrestling matches than the likes of John Cena and Randy Orton.

While I personally believe that Hiroshi Tanahashi should be in there instead of Punk, I'd look at that as a decent reflection of the top (most entertaining) wrestlers of the past ten years.

Who would you have in there instead?

 

But you have watched wrestling and so must have some names that you rate higher than others....?

 

AJ has never been a massive star. He's a star in a weak era. Although he is the best out of the three.

Bryan was never a draw. The numbers he drew were mostly terrible. WWE didn't ruin him. He just didn't have what it takes to be a massive star. Punk's pipebomb actually turned off viewers rather than gained them.

How about Batista. Massive star in the late 2000s. Same with Undertaker, Edge, HHH, Orton and others from that era. I am not a massive Cena fan. But he also is better than those three.

 

You've missed the point:

"How is "best" defined? Well that's entirely up to you! Be it money on the mic, in the ring or at the box office this is about what and who YOU enjoyed the most, for whatever reason!"

Most people don't need somebody to be a massive star or draw at the gate to be entertained by them or consider them to be "the best". This entire thing is based on who people enjoyed watching the most throughout the year.

 

Guess I'll start things off then. My top 25 wrestlers of 2018, taking into account how much I've enjoyed them across the year:

1. AJ Styles
2. Kazuchika Okada
3. Kenny Omega
4. Will Ospreay
5. Zack Sabre Jr
6. Aleister Black
7. Brock Lesnar
8. Pete Dunne
9. Johnny Gargano
10. Kota Ibushi
11. Thomaso Ciampa
12. KUSHIDA
13. Shayna Bayzler
14. The Undisputed Era
15. Tetsuya Naito
16. Braun Strowman
17. Chris Jericho
18. Hiroshi Tanahashi
19. Velveteen Dream
20. Moustache Mountain
21. Ronda Rowsey
22. Becky Lynch
23. Daniel Bryan
24. Cody
25. Charlotte Flair

My list is dominated by WWE, New Japan and NXT purely because they're the promotions I've been most exposed to this year.

Styles shouldn't really need an explanation - a massive title reign for a guy I consider to be one of the two best in the business and a number of great (if poorly built) matches across the year take my number one spot. Other than Styles, Kazuchika Okada is the most consistently excellent wrestler on the planet (and if not for Styles title run I would have had him as my #1).

This is a year where Omega is impossible to ignore and Will Ospreay and Zack Sabre Jr are the other guys I go out of the way to watch due to them being the best at their styles.

Jericho makes the list(!) for doing some pretty unique stuff for a long-time WWE contractor, in holding a title in New Japan and booking his own wrestling shows.

I don't particularly enjoy Cody as a wrestler but the way he's transformed himself (and potentially the business) is worthy of his inclusion in my nominations.

Anybody else on the Pro Wrestling Forum got any favourite wrestlers of the past year?

 

Thats fine. That list of nominations is just my opinion on who the best wrestlers of this year have been. When other people make their nominations we'll start to see a: who their favourites of the year have been and b: what a combined list of everybody on PWF would look like (everybody that nomonates that is!)

I get the argument that Ospreay is a spot monkey and that the high spots in his matches can look over coreographed, but at the same time they make for a great way to break up any card and i genuinely enjoy them.

 

Omega and Okada are 1 and 2 with Tanahashi, ZSJ and Ibushi tied for 3rd, Naito in at 4th and I can't really think of a 5th to be honest. I've barely paid attention to anything besides New Japan this year just because everything else is just a complete waste of time. Velveteen at 5th maybe? Idk man.

 

Actually fuck that, I've got a 5th. Switchblade Jay White. Easy. Started out the year as an absolute joke to everyone 'cept me it felt like, got a win over Omega that was immediately overshadowed by the Golden Lovers reunion, had a lackluster run as US Champion before dropping it Juice Robinson, but the G1, man. Sure, Jay didn't win, but the G1 was Jays big break. Every fuckin day that dude performed he just knocked it out of the park and he beat Okada AND Tanahashi, and then he goes on to actually make me fucking care about the Bullet Club of all things when he (and Gedo) turned on Okada.

And the other thing, dudes still in his mid-20s. Awesome character, pretty solid wrestling, year started rough for him but he really bought it back.

 

Lesnar
Reigns
Braun
Orton
Styles

The rest are irrelevant.

 

@Roadster @Highspot @Cortana Any chance we can get this thread in site announcements for the next week? It's fine if not but maybe people aren't nominating because the thread is out of the way or maybe the majority aren't interested in throwing in a list, wouldn't hurt to give it a bit more exposure though?