The 411 Wrestling Year-End Awards: Part Seven – Best Promotion of 2017: NJPW, WWE, ROH, More

Welcome back to the Wrestling Top 5, year-end awards edition! What we are going to is take a topic, and all the writers here on 411 will have the ability to give us their Top 5 on said topic, and the end, based on where all of these topics rank on people’s list, we will create an overall Top 5 list. It looks a little like this…

1st – 5
2nd – 4
3rd – 3
4th – 2
5th – 1

It’s similar to how we do the WOTW voting. At the end we tally the scores and get our overall top 5! It’s highly non-official and final, like WWE’s old power rankings. From some of the best and worst, the 411 staff is ready to break down the awards! Thanks for joining us, and lets get down to work.

Kevin Pantoja
5. Dragon Gate
4. Lucha Underground
3. NJPW
2. WWE/NXT

1. PROGRESS – I’d say that NXT and NJPW had higher highs at times, but PROGRESS was the most consistently strong promotion all year. WWE had some disappointing shows, matches and angles, which can kind of be expected when you produce so much content. NJPW is VERY top heavy, but a lot of their shows featured programs on the undercard that meant nothing and were easy to skip over. With PROGRESS, I care about everything they do and everyone has a purpose. The shows all had something going for them and most importantly, the stories mattered. Pete Dunne, Tyler Bate, Travis Banks, Trent Seven, Toni Storm, TK Cooper, Dahlia Black, Matt Riddle. The list goes on and on. PROGRESS was the best promotion this year.

JUSTIN WATRY
5. Abstain
4. ROH
3. Lucha Underground
2. NJPW

1. WWE/NXT – Are NXT and WWE the same? I have no clue anymore. Either way, my rankings would not change. WWE reigns supreme in 2017 for a number of reasons. First is something I have mentioned before. They brought the goods from January-December. NXT has the luxury of a live special every few months with a weekly one hour show. WWE has 5-7 hours of programming every single week to put on TV and then have a monthly PPV. Sometimes TWO PPVs per month. Unbelievable. They will never get the credit they deserve for that. The other reason is that the weekly shows have actually been solid. Raw had a good year. Smackdown LIVE stumbled and was disappointing at times but got back on the right track in November and started things off fresh in early 2017. Most importantly though, business is a booming! The stock price is currently sitting at $2.5 BILLION which is just unreal considering it spent much of the past two years hovering around the one billion mark. To more than double in a year is ridiculous. The jokes about Vince McMahon being a millionaire who should be a billionaire need to stay in 2011. Sorry CM Punk. That has not been true since 2015 and certainly are not true now. If he wants to take some of that HUGE chunk of change and blow $100 million on whatever he wants, go ahead. At age 72, let the man do his thing. If it fails and is a colossal waste of time, I am sure his wallet will be just fine. There is still that other two billion plus remaining in WWE, who keep posting record numbers every quarter. Out of touch, am I right?

Rob Stewart
5. EVOLVE
4. Lucha Underground
3. Ring of Honor
2. WWE

1. NJPW – I alluded to this earlier, but this was really a breakout year for NJPW just for the fact that it got folks I know who don’t even watch WWE to ask what was the deal with it. Now, a lot of that was because of Dave Meltzer’s assault on his own 5-star rating scale, but if NJPW wasn’t putting on matches that merited his praise, he wouldn’t have had to do it, I suppose. This was a banner year for a promotion that constantly puts on great shows, with Kaz Okada and Kenny Omega just hitting every home run they could, two absolutely fantastic shows in Dominion and Wrestle Kingdom, an incredibly exciting and worthwhile G1 Climax Final, and all the late year drama of Chris Jericho’s appearances. No one should be arguing that NJPW isn’t usually elite, but moreso than maybe other, this was far-and-away the year that belonged to them.

Jack Stevenson
5. Progress Wrestling
4. Fight Club Pro
3. New Japan Pro Wrestling
2. AAW: Professional Wrestling Redefined

1. Dragon Gate – The last few years I’ve given this award to whichever indie I was into at the time, but 2017 was the year I properly invested in Dragon Gate, and I just love the style so much that I think the company will get my vote in this award every year for the foreseeable future. There is nowhere else on the planet capable of presenting pro wrestling like Dragon Gate do. Nothing invigorates me more in wrestling than when the final stretch of a Dragon Gate six or eight or ten man tag gets really, really good, bodies start flying all over the place and everyone’s busting out the coolest moves in the world and there’s all these moving parts going a thousand miles an hour but it all just works. And even by their standards, the run Dragon Gate had coming out of Kobe Pro Wrestling Festival was terrific, with every faction getting involved in the super hot Survival Race round robin tournament, the losing group forced to disband. This gave the promotion a real sense of purpose and direction, and once the tournament had concluded at the splendid Dangerous Gate show there was a refreshing new landscape to the roster, with the veteran Jimmyz group no longer allowed to team with each other and thus trying to form new alliances individually. It was a great storyline that made the promotion noticeably better even once it had concluded. So, in conclusion, Dragon Gate are the best, I love them, they are the promotion of my heart. And, by extension, Promotion of the Year.

Ken Hill
5. Ring of Honor
4. Pro Wrestling Guerrilla
3. World Wrestling Entertainment
2. Lucha Underground

1. New Japan Pro-Wrestling – If you’ve followed my show (stay “Kennected” if you do), you’ll know that I’ve fully admitted to have watched little wrestling outside of WWE, but I do my level best to keep tabs on other promotions in and outside of the states, chiefly Lucha Underground and my top pick NJPW. From what I’ve gleaned of the various Wrestle Kingdom, NJ Cup, G1 Climax and other staple New Japan events through clips and reviews from my 411Mania colleagues over the last couple years, what strikes me most about the promotion is not only the overall consistent and high-end quality of the matches they produce, but the psychology in which the events are structured, allowing for a steady and sensible creative flow from the opening match, organically building up all the way to the climactic main event, a steadiness I’m not afraid to say WWE is severely lacking at times in their creative department.

Jake Chambers
5. CMLL
4. Beyond Wrestling
3. EVOLVE
2. Lucha Underground

1. New Japan Pro-Wrestling – As a bigger All Japan and NOAH fan most of my life, it’s still weird to me that for like the 6th straight year NJPW has been an automatic top promotion in the dizzying array of wrestling companies I now watch. To a northeast kid, the King’s Road style appealed to my WWF-raised appetites more than the Strong Style and New Japan’s WCW connection. And sure, NJPW doesn’t really do Strong Style anymore anyways, with the end of Shibata’s run probably being the last real connection to that era we’ll see. Instead, they now work this hybrid King’s Road, Lucha and US Indy, all strained through the Tanahashi filter – and it’s kind of the best. If you are a “mature” fan, this brand of wrestling will really appeal to you in the face of the WWE’s degradation into a state of illogical mediocrity. Their predictable schedule helps, and while that’s the Japanese tradition, every year as the WWE gets worse the stability and sporting style of the NJPW schedule feels more welcoming. What’s kind of the most incredible about NJPW at this point in time, after a year that’s easily been a global crossover success, it doesn’t feel like they’re willing to sacrifice anything to become more mainstream. NJPW seems poised to get bigger with a wrestling programming mentality still keyed in to the sensibility of the Japanese fan. And for a world that’s been forced into bending to the emptiness of American pop culture for decades, this is an ironic and welcome twist at a time when globalization has sucked the geographic soul out of so much that we consume.

Larry Csonka
5. Lucha Underground
4. ROH
3. PROGRESS
2. EVOLVE

1. NJPW – Please let me be clear here, the NJPW product FAR FROM PERFECT, and the NJPW Destruction in Fukushima show was a perfect example of that. The constant interference in Suzuki matches, the abuse of referees; yes NJPW does pure sport very well, but they fall victim to the same issues that North American wrestling does, they are not immune. And to be honest, the booking of the tag divisions remains the weakest part of the product. But overall I personally love NJPW because I get a ton of great matches and I love great wrestling. The storylines and angles presented and are easy to follow, even though I don’t speak Japanese and comparatively I, personally, get more enjoyment out of the NJPW. It makes me happy, it makes me enjoy being a fane and it makes my work fun. It’s what fits best for me right now, and they were my top promotion of the year.

Jake St-Pierre
5. Lucha Underground
4. Ring of Honor
3. Pro Wrestling Guerrilla
2. PROGRESS Wrestling

1. New Japan Pro Wrestling – This is probably the easiest award of the year to give out, and really has been for the past several years. New Japan is simply unmatched when it comes to presenting a serious, credible wrestling product. It’s largely no-nonsense and backs its reputation up with some of the best wrestling the world has ever seen. That might be truer for 2017 than it has been for any other year when you consider some of the stuff we got. There’s the legendary feud between Kazuchika Okada and Kenny Omega, Katsuyori Shibata’s last stand, the best G1 Climax finale in history, and a wonderful American expansion during the summer. That’s not even going into the insanity of Chris Jericho being in a non-WWE ring for the first time in 20 years. New Japan has made me happy to be a wrestling fan, and it feels great knowing I don’t have to worry about them jumping the shark. They stay true to themselves and it makes for some of the most compelling wrestling I’ve ever seen.

AND 411’s The Best Promotions of 2017 ARE…

5. ROH – 10 points

4. PROGRESS – 13 points

3 WWE/NXT – 16 points

2. Lucha Underground – 17 points

1. NJPW – 35 points

THE 2017 411 WRESTLING AWARDS:
* The Biggest Disappointment of The Year: >Katsuyori Shibata’s Injury & Retirement – 14points
* The Best Non-Wrestler: Dario Cueto – 17points
* The Best Tag Team of The Year: The Usos – 31points
* The Worst Major Shows/PPV of 2017: WWE Battleground 2017 – 16points
* The Best Female Wrestler of 2017: Asuka – 24points
* The Best PPV/Major Show of 2017: NJPW Wrestlekingdom 11 – 11points