50 Greatest WWE Raw Moments Ever
Every star, every show, every Monday. The 50 best moments from over 30 years of WWE history
Spoiler Alert for the subsequent list: No beer bath. No DX army nor its stupid little "tank". No WCW simulcast.
Monday Night Raw is over 30 years old, and in the same way WWE finally figured out how important it was to shelve its gratitude for Attitude, so too will this list. It's an unfathomable amount of time for any show to be on the air, but three decades can at least account for a comfortable amount of promos, moments and matches that justify earnest praise as opposed to the over-familiar talking heads gawping incorrectly about over-played dross.
Who needs to relive these three famous spots yet again anyway? Virtually every company-mandated poll on the best Raw moment ever will end with one of them winning by a landslide as it is. Triple H successfully pushed the prevailing narrative that his DX Army assault on a live Nitro at the Norfolk Scope in 1998 transformed the Monday Night Wars that were eventually won by Vince McMahon on that famous March 2001 night. Stone Cold Steve Austin covering Vince, Shane and The Rock with beer after promising to burn the SmackDown Hotel to the ground has been well beaten into that exact same surface since 1999.
For so long, those and similar ones like it were the only moments the flagship dared to promote. There was always more to like if you knew where to look...
50. CM Punk Lashes Out After Elimination Chamber (March 3rd, 2025)
In a promo that felt as close to on-the-fly as anything any WWE show could or would permit, CM Punk scorching the earth hours removed from John Cena's seismic heel turn turned out to be there to cover up a lack of a plan rather than the next big step in one.
It'd rank higher if it meant anything in the end, but it's fascinating to now think that one of 2025's only great verbal displays happened because Triple H was sending one of his soldiers out there to try and make sense of a storyline forced through by his political rival and boss Dwayne Johnson.
The tectonic plates in the WWE Universe had shifted with Cena's heel turn, and Punk had been a victim of 'The Champ' in the titular cage match just minutes before he dead-eyed 'The Final Boss' and low-blowed Cody. What nobody knew then was how poor virtually all of the follow up would be, the total lack of direction for the Cena character, and the total lack of...anything from The Rock. Punk spewed bile anyway, totally unconcerned by any of that.
Calling Rock a "bald fraud", his arm-tapping routine a load of "bullsh*t" and calling out the "fake title" he'd made for himself either side of WrestleMania 40, he then moved onto the "see-through" Cena and how he'd been selling "sh*t" all along, and how Mr "Never Give Up" did just that. Free of not having a time machine and seeing how none of them mattered, the audience in the building, Pat McAfee on commentary and just about everybody else watching at home went wild for his words. It was impossible not to.