Ranking All 29 WWE Returns And Debuts In 2022

15. Max Dupri/LA Knight

Cody Rhodes
WWE.com

Shaun Ricker deserves his own separate recognition for surviving a horrible gimmick overhaul upon being called up to SmackDown in May.

Rather than portraying the LA Knight character he made a small cult favorite in NXT, he was reborn as Max Dupri, the head of Maximum Male Models who was mildly obsessed with getting people to pronounce his last name correctly. Knight shed that go-nowhere gimmick over the course of a few weeks in September, reverting to his LA persona and ditching the models and his storyline sister Maxxine.

Since then, Knight has engaged in a feud with Bray Wyatt, which means a fair amount of TV time (Yeah!), but it’s hard to envision he’ll come out on top in this one. Still, we’ll lump Knight in the middle of the pack given where he ended up compared to where he began.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.