3. Shawn Michaels
When Scott Hall and Kevin Nash left WWF in summer 1996 and kicked off the hottest angle in professional wrestling, they also kicked off 84 consecutive weeks of WCW winning the ratings war. It also was the lowest low point for WWF during the Monday Night Wars. If a top star was looking at things dispassionately and only with his wallet in mind, he certainly would be tempted to jump to WCW for guaranteed money. For the Heartbreak Kid, the temptation was more than just money and ratings Hall and Nash were Michaels best friends in WWF, good enough friends that he and Triple H broke kayfabe with them in the infamous MSG Incident. Michaels, who was champ throughout summer 1996 has admitted in interviews that it was very hard to resist the temptation to jump to WCW. He acknowledged in a SLAM! Wrestling interview that there was never a formal offer from WCW, but that my buddies always said the door was open there. While he sums up leaving WWF as a brief thought that he quickly discarded, Michaels could be seen throwing hand signs to his buddies during promos (and vice versa), so he clearly had his friends on his mind during this period. HBK leaving for WCW in 1996 would have been devastating to WWF and very well could have tipped the scales even farther in WCWs favor. Without Michaels, there wouldnt have been a D-Generation X, which was a major driving force not just throughout the Attitude Era, but also in the rise of one of the most important people in the company today, Triple H. How would he have fared without a DX? Its almost too big of a What if? question to pose.