10 Greatest WWE Raw Endings Ever

In case you haven't heard, WWE is celebrating a quarter century of Monday Night Raw this week with a bumper anniversary special featuring wrestling royalty past and present.

What they probably won't be telling you, however, is that of the some 1,200+ episodes that have aired since 1993, only a small sample have really produced the kind of moments that will be replayed for years to come in compilation videos.

The endings, for example, are rarely anything to write home about. A lot of the time, the WWE writing staff is simply too preoccupied with advancing a given storyline from A to B to worry about whether something is "entertaining" or "compelling".

That said, there have been one or two times that, for all their missteps, they've succeeded unequivocally in marrying the two together, the result of which is often earth-shattering endings that both shock and delight the audience in equal measure.

In a way, we really ought to be grateful that moments like these are so few and far between. If we got them every week, they wouldn't mean half as much.

The 2004 WWE Draft, like most of them, was a mixed bag. The majority of the lottery picks were lower mid-carders of minimal consequence, and where bigger stars were traded - i.e. Triple H - they were immediately (and inexplicably) switched back later on in the week.

Its ending, however, was on point. The Game - a new SmackDown recruit (or so we thought at the time) - was given a shot at the Eddie Guerrero's WWE Championship by GM Paul Heyman, marking a rare occasion on which the blue brand's biggest prize would be defended on Monday Night Raw.

The match itself perhaps wasn't given the time to reach the sort of standard you would expect of its two competitors, but the melee that ensued after the final bell was spectacular. A sea of red and blue shirts began descending to the ring, leading to one of the most wild brawls WWE TV has ever seen.

What would have made this moment truly perfect is if Eddie, a title holder for just a month, had been given the opportunity to score a victory over The Game. But this was 2004: Mr Stephanie McMahon almost never lost, and even with a Shawn Michaels assist they still settled on a DQ finish instead.