Ranking What Was Really The Best Wrestling Finisher Every Year 1990-2020
Immortal Combat.
Honourable mentions are vast.
Bret Hart's Sharpshooter, invariably built towards with a gripping and immersive logic, wasn't spectacular enough to make the grade, painful though it was to merely look at. Besides which, he often won with pinning combinations that were sold as strategic triumphs and not acts of f*cking theft booked as flukes to justify a rematch.
Goldberg's Jackhammer was legendary - a hugely impressive display of strength punctuated with a fantastic oh-sh*t snap - but he wasn't the most entertaining bald icon of 1998.
In a decision many will feel personally insulted by, there is no room either for the super-finishers with which AJPW's Four Pillars enshrined themselves into legend. This, to be clear, is not a list of the best finishers ever - Kenta Kobashi's Burning Hammer's scarce and immaculate mythology positions it at the top end of such a list - but rather a list in celebration of the best finishers wrestlers used (and in some cases conceived) to get over as standouts of the given calendar year.
Some are so spectacular that they simply cannot be ignored. Others possess a pristine and under-appreciated narrative heft.
Some, thrillingly, have the lot...
31. 1990 - Frankensteiner
Jaw-dropping and futuristic, Scott Steiner's Frankensteiner was a sensation in 1990.
It fused the two key components of a finish perfectly: it looked cooler than everything else he (or for that matter, anybody) did, and it looked rather difficult to kick out of, since he used those tree trunks he called thighs to spike guys directly onto their heads.
It required an insane level of agility and power. Steiner would send his opponents hurtling towards the ropes, jump up to meet them waist to head-height with an astonishing vertical leap, and, with one fluid motion that never looked cooperative, dropped them scalp-first with the takedown.
And because he was Steiner - a legitimate badass who rather enjoyed laying sh*t in so hard it became compacted - that head drop looked less like a "bump" and more like a "drill through the wooden boards".