10 Times Wrestlers Stole An Opponent’s Finisher (& Did It BETTER)

The very best instances of finishing move thievery display not just theft, but a creative tweak.

When Will Ospreay and Swerve Strickland mimicked The Young Bucks' TK Driver at the AEW PPV All In: Texas, it wasn't a direct copy of the flagrantly obnoxious Piledriver variant. Anybody can put the spike into a spike Piledriver, much like how anybody can perform a Tombstone Piledriver as or more convincingly as The Undertaker; Will Ospreay certainly mastered the art form.

As for Swerve? He forewent the traditional springboard somersault with which Nicholas Jackson told opponents to eat sh*t by, instead, double foot stomping Matthew into the ground.

It was a masterful take on an already masterful move.

Similarly, at NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn's fourth outing, Johnny Gargano achieved something similar. He used Tommaso Ciampa's Willow's Bell - a DDT which requires a nefariously naff set up wherein the victim must be straddled between the top and middle ropes - while putting his own spin on the thing. Gargano had already grasped his own DDT, a slingshot version to be precise, so by combining his variant with his wrestling soulmate's, he concocted a sickening killer of a move, made all the better by Ciampa's hardened selling of the thing.

Gargano could have done without the flat back bump onto the exposed wood, mind.