WingedEagle

El-P, give me 5 to watch.

Never understood the love. Maybe if I grew up watching him and learned wrestling through WMC TV I'd feel differently. He has a few good matches and brawls. Nothing I couldn't live without and certainly nothing that left any real imprint on me as a fan. Just a guy who was there.

Pop & Dunc do it again. Had Aldridge passed on SAS he would've been permanently been branded as Zach Randolph's crown in my book, but he's now got a chance to establish a legit legacy. I am so stoked to see what they can do this year. If I weren't a firm believer that you only get one team in every sport I'd have switched over to them by now. As it is I think its high time I picked up a Duncan jersey.

Lawler and Funk? Funk could be anywhere from top 25 to bottom 25. Can't imagine ranking Lawler.

Offhand, Hansen and Bryan are the only Americans with a chance of eclipsing him. And frankly I don't see Hansen having a chance. But I'm open to it. Curious if anyone has Cena quite that high. Probably the only other domestic worker who may make it to the same ballpark.

Definitely interesting numbers about Russell. Its good to get a reality check on his & others from that era's greatness from time to time. Some get dismissed a little too easily but with Russ there's clearly reason to keep his name in the discussion. On the FA front today, SAS keeping Green at 11 per when Carroll went for 15 and Brandon Knight got 12 is a hell of a deal. If LMA doesn't sign there he is dead to me. Just stay in PDX and enjoy the rain and long summers. I cannot wait to see them reload. Chandler to PHX is interesting albeit likely a bit of an overpay at his age, but absent another piece (perhaps a Bledsoe trade when LMA doesn't follow) I'm not sure where it gets them. Also love to see Dallas flaming out. My Nets clearly had the best day. Nothing like spending big to try and avoid handing off a lottery pick with no hope for another 4 years. Thank god for wrestling and playoff basketball.

OJ, no one's suggesting it was a one man team. But it was absolutely a one star team. Jordan doesn't win a couple big games without Pax & Kerr & others nailing a couple shots. Do I think he would've won those series without those guys? Absolutely. Someone else always needs to make a play, but as Elliott said they're not in the playoffs, advancing and in a position to do anything without Duncan carrying them on his back every night.

Totally agree, both TV matches were better than the ones you cited from the PPV. Definitely a solid show, but odd when the TV blows it out of the water.

Shoe, you get a chance to check out last week's TV yet? Probably the best hour of TV this year and in a long time. Nak/Strong was terrific and the 6-man was a MOTYC.

I wouldn't say its bad faith but won't challenge you if you believe it to be the case. I wouldn't be at all surprised - or blame anyone - if people in these circles have some Flair fatigue. They may have been watching his greatest hits and b-sides for years, some many times over, which may make it harder to appreciate him in the context of fresher work.

Thanks, appreciate the walkthrough of how you approach it. Do you generally find you can get more excited about a match with that kind of narrative or are game to appreciate either style if done well?

I had high hopes for Reigns-Sheamus but was pretty disappointed. Felt flat the whole way without ever really kicking into another gear, almost as though they were never on the same page.

I can only imagine it was based on seeing the Steiners matches and their other work in WCW (if I recall they had a GREAT match with Rhodes & Windham) and extrapolating from there based on praise for their AJPW work. But that's pure speculation.

I'm not sure its gospel they sucked, but how many good matches did they have as a team unless it was against the the top AJ tags? Other than the Steiner affair. And their matches vs. the AJ crew were at least to me clearly inferior than any other tags the big guns were throwing out at the time. Not horrible, but nothing that matched their singles work or Gordy/Hansen Gordy/Freebirds.

Could we name 250 better wrestlers from the last 18 months? How many this year alone? The insanity!

What wrestler hasn't deviated from a single-minded purpose like seems to be the case against Flair here? Surely everyone you list above have plenty of matches where their offense i more than keyed in to a single body part. If Flair just doesn't click with you for some reason that's one thing, but that criticism seems to hold him to an unfair standard that should apply across the board. Never mind the fact that it would likely lead to a lot more boring, less interesting matches if each one had to follow such a strict path.

"Jelly legs" was used there as representative of his silliness / selling / routine. Not suggesting any one facet of his game would dramatically impact where he stands.

Apparently Rowan is on the DL.

A match where the work they do is more important than the narrative presented. Or, in some cases, where there is no narrative present. Not trolling here. At all. But I'm not sure I follow. Are we talking about a narrative as presented in commentary? Where they hit you over the head working a body part? Where there's a clearly identified storyline heading into the match which is played out? Is this generally as a much a subjective determination as whether you dug Cena/Owens, for example?

I prefer the Psicosis matches in ECW and BATB to Eddy at Havoc. The Eddy Smackdown match also wouldn't rank as my WWE MOTY let alone all time which may explain why my boat here is a lonely one. Bottom line nothing he's done is making my desert island boxed set, much less single disc comp.

I agree with both of these points. Sometimes you'll watch Funk and the jelly legs are fantastic. Other times I'll watch him and wish he'd find something, anything else to do. Guys like that have a definite floor and ceiling on my ballot. But I absolutely get why mileage may vary on him depending on your preferences / mood / what kind of day you had.

This is why it will be hard for me to rank him too highly. I want to be able to say that the guys at the top of my list had some absolute classics.