Triple H

[Mad Dog]

I think Mutoh was clearly better when he came back with the shaved head and new style but that's only about 6 months of overlap.

 

I think you might be able to say the Rock was better than HHH in 2000. You can eliminate the HHH matches as those cancel each other out and then you have the Benoit match at Fully Loaded and some of the Angle stuff. I think HHH's best stuff was probably better but I think if you went match by match that Rock might have had a better year in hindsight.

[Tim Cooke]

Were any of his matches in 2000 other than the Foley garbage matches and the TAKA match actually good?

 

The first Foley match is good but I'm not sure HIAC holds up. The Taka match is a myth in that it's nothing special at all, especially for Taka matches. Patterson/Briscoe did a much better job with the Mean Street Posse a year earlier in terms of carry jobs.

[KB8]

I watched a ton of WWF TV matches from 2000 a few years back and I found Helmsley that year to be mostly fun in a TV match setting (on Tim's point: I don't even remember anything about the Taka match). "Bloated" is definitely the word I'd use to describe him in a PPV setting, but his TV stuff was much tighter. There was some PPV stuff that year I enjoyed as well, though. The Rock match from Backlash is crazy overbooked Attitude Era ridiculousness in the good way (if you're someone who thinks there is a good way, at least), the Foley match from the Rumble is good (though I would say it's very much a Foley show), and the last man standing match against Jericho is one of the only times where I actually like him working methodical, primarily because him and Stephanie are a great pair of assholes and fill in the downtime with goading of Jericho.

 

Thought Rock was better than him that year, though. I took part in a best match of the 00s poll on another forum a couple years ago, and while I'd still say 2000 is Hunter's best year, I certainly wouldn't put him in the same bracket as Kawada for WOTY (also thought Tajiri was WOTY in the US and Helmsley wasn't all that close).

[Johnny Sorrow]

 

So I'm watching the Scooby Doo Wrestlemania Mystery (not even sorry)

Hey, I liked it. Even aside from being a perfectly decent modern Scooby Doo DTV movie (something we don't get many of nowadays), it was also a FASCINATING look into the warped psychology of the WWE office. They clearly had all kinds of script approval and executive meddling going on here, and seeing their idea of A Perfect WWE Universe really was a little bit mind-blowing.

 

Especially when it's revealed that

the villain behind the mask of the ghost bear is a bitter former employee, an injured ex-wrestler whose entire villainy spawns from the fact that he doesn't want his impressionable young son to become a wrestler and end up like him. I mean, holy SHIT that's so fucking wrong.

Actually, the guy who ends being the villian is the young man's Uncle who doesn't want him to become a wrestler. And his reason for being the Ghost Bear has nothing to do with his nephew. The plot is to steal the new Championship Belt that is covered in gold and jewels so he can sell it and become rich.

 

Sorry, I got the movie for my nephew and since then have probably seen it at least thirty times. And HHH is barely in it.

[goodhelmet]

 

Were any of his matches in 2000 other than the Foley garbage matches and the TAKA match actually good?

 

The first Foley match is good but I'm not sure HIAC holds up. The Taka match is a myth in that it's nothing special at all, especially for Taka matches. Patterson/Briscoe did a much better job with the Mean Street Posse a year earlier in terms of carry jobs.

 

 

It wasn't even good. HHH, the villain, overcomes Taka, Funaki and the APA who were hired by Kaientai earlier in the show. TAKA was never on offense for a prlonged amount of time, and when he was, it was 4 on 1. The TAKA match is garbage and actually accentuates the worst HHH tendencies. It is not a credit to him as a performer or wrestler.

[Loss]

The best thing about that match was that they were able to get the crowd to bite on a single nearfall, but it took a ton of booking tricks to make that happen.

[Gregor]

It's been a while since I last watched it, but I didn't like the Rumble match. A lot of the stuff with the weapons felt forced. It was just like, "Hey, now we're going to use barbed wire," or, "Now we're upping things even more with THUMBTACKS!" and all they had to do was reach under the ring. There wasn't anything clever about the way they introduced or got rid of them. Compare that to how organically Foley's previous crazy brawls flowed, or even to the iron man match a few months later, and this one doesn't seem like it had the same amount of thought put into it.

 

I do remember really liking the PPV match with Benoit, though.

[Microstatistics]

Honestly, it's unlikely, but I could see him sneak into the 85-100 tier for me. I guess he benefits from my heavy emphasis on high-end stuff. Though, you could argue his good match/total match ratio is awful and diminishes his case.

Still, the Foley, Austin, Bryan matches are all high-end and he effectively plays his role in them. The 2005 HIAC vs. Batista is his crowning achievement IMO since he got a great match out of a lesser wrestler.

[Grimmas]

2 hours ago, Microstatistics said:

Still, the Foley, Austin, Bryan matches are all high-end and he effectively plays his role in them. The 2005 HIAC vs. Batista is his crowning achievement IMO since he got a great match out of a lesser wrestler.

Batista > Trips

[cactus]

I know there's a good worker hidden inside Triple H. He can work exceptionally well as a despicable heel. His matches with Bryan at Wrestlemania XXX and Foley at Royal Rumble 2000 prove this. The issue with him is that he insists on going 25+ minutes when he could have easily made his point in 15. With the exception of the mixed tag with Rousey, nearly all of his matches in the last decade have felt like total slogs. Oh, he also can't work as a babyface to save his life. 

[Boss Rock]

Agreed that there was a good wrestler buried under all the insecurities and ego. There's an alternate universe where he learned the correct lessons from Flair by bumping and selling his ass off and not making everything a self-conscious epic where he dominates.

[Cap]

I'll just sort of echo what has been said about him here recently and a lot over the years. There are too many great matches to dismiss him as a bad wrestler. Even more, I think he is a quite good wrestler. However, NL mentioned this line over the GME that gets bounced around about him more broadly: HHH is a good wrestler who thinks he is a great wrestler, which often leads him to a terrible wrestler. HHH was quite good, but he was put in positions that put him out of his depth and/or allowed him to wade out past his depth on his own.  Given all the high profile feuds and matches, he should be a stronger contender I think. I'm also guessing that if you asked him what his 10 best matches were there would be very little overlap with what I think they are.

[elliott]

I didn't rate HHH in 2016 and I nailed it. HHH sucks. 

[Ed.]

He's tremendous in 2000, and has some really great highlights sporadically after that (2001 tag against Jericho and Benoit, HBK @ Summerslam 02, Bryan at mania 30), but more often than not he was pretty bad and a complete drag on the company.  No chance whatsoever.

[Cap]

To follow up on what I said earlier, I think his bad will hurt him more in my eyes because he chose to be that.  His lows seem quite different than someone who maybe takes a while to find their form or who declines significantly at the end of their career.

[strobogo]

HHH is a guy I think should be on the list easy. I think his reign of terror is actually very underrated and he had a lot of very good to great stuff during that period. I even like the HHH vs Nash feud for whatever reason. Shao Khan HHH having a ROH match with Bryan at WM was pretty awesome. And there's a lot of really good stuff in between there.

 

But then I start to break down what he did and I'm thinking....well, he didn't do Harley as good as Harley. He didn't do Flair as good as Flair. He didn't do HBK as good as HBK. He thought he was doing it better than all of them, but he certainly wasn't. 

[Jmare007]

HHH's case is basically a peak of 12-16 months from 2000 to 2001 and then pick and choose the few standout matches before and after. He barely made it in my list last time and there's no way he makes it again.

[strobogo]

What stand out matches does he have before 2000? Dude straight fucking sucked for his first 5 years in WWF.

[Jmare007]

The ladder match against Rock? Idk, it's HHH so I'm not gonna put any effort trying to remember if there's is one

[Reel]

The 1997 MSG match against Cactus is the one that comes to mind for me. 

[kid dracula]

No way in hell on HHH. My mindset is usually to weigh the good much more heavily than the bad, but in the case of HHH, one can imagine that the entire wrestling business might be better off if he had never entered it. Also, I can hardly think of another wrestler whose case for being great depends more heavily on a single match (RR 2000). Ultimate Warrior had a huge physique and a handful of good matches, too! 

[Cap]

HHH is a LONG shot for my list (almost surely not on it), but I think comparing him to Warrior seems a bit unfair. HHH has his flaws but he is a bit more than a physique and some good matches.

[elliott]

12 hours ago, strobogo said:

What stand out matches does he have before 2000? Dude straight fucking sucked for his first 5 years in WWF.

 

I thought about this too and I also thought of the Ladder match and the MSG match with Cactus. So that's two, but if you think about it a lil more, the Rock came out of the ladder match as the clear next superstar of the company, not HHH. And the brawl with Cactus is a memorable part of Cactus' story, not as much HHH's. THe 97 Cactus match he's more of a warm body. 

If you look at the list of candidates you'll see a lot of different profiles. Some folks are great right away. Some folks it takes time and maybe something happens but eventually the switch flips and they become great and stay great for a long time. Some folks have an incandescent peak that burns out too quickly. Some are really good for a really long time and are never boring. 

What's HHH's profile?

Took him 6 years to become better than average. Was pushed to the moon and great for about 16 months, but its not like he was even the best guy in the US at the time, let alone the entire world. Then he got hurt, came back and never reached that level again. There's some great stuff after the injury, but its few and far between despite more booking advantages than probably any wrestler in history. This doesn't strike me as a top 100 GWE Profile. 

Who had their career best match against HHH? 

[KB8]

What I will say about Helmsley is that he had very good corner shoulder blocks. If he'd decided to be a Shoulder Block Guy rather than a High Knee Guy he may have had an outside shot at the bottom 5. But he didn't and I'm sure he'll cry himself to sleep about that every night. 

[Tetsujin]

I would say Batista had his best match ever with Trips at Vengeance 2005, the HIAC.

Triple H is a guy I don't think deserves to be considered as great because reasons we all know, but I seriously think he really is pretty great at his best. Hell, I think he reached that level more times than people tend to give him credit for. Since 2002 he have:

-Elimination Chamber 2002 (his performance kinda puts together the whole match).

-WM XX main event, when I think he's the best performer of the match.

-The Batista feud, the only time in his career he put over someone else, with the HIAC showdown as their greatest hit and a legit MOTYC.

-WM XXIV Orton/Cena/HHH, very fun triple threat kinda underrated because how good that whole WM edition was (specially the MITB, Shawn/Flair and the main event. Oh and people seem to really like Show/Floyd too for whatever reason, but that's another story).

-vs Cena at Night of Champions 2008. Their best match together I think, pretty cool.

-Both 2008 and 2009 Elimination Chambers.

-That TLC with Shawn against JeriShow, very fun stuff.

-vs Sheamus at WM XXVI (he should have lost, yeah, but still pretty good match).

-Both Taker matches at WM XXVII and XXVIII. I know some people don't like that kind of WWE epic storytelling, but I enjoy it for special ocassions like those two.

-I remember really liking the cage match with Lesnar, but I should rewatch it, it's been a while.

-Shield vs Evolution. Those two matches are amazing.

-The Ambrose title match. This was the kind of match nobody expected to be that good, but damn they had so much quemistry. It was worked like a modern NWA title match, in a good way.

-The Rollins match. Yeah I really like that, and I'm not really a fan of either guy. But that match worked pretty well for me.

-Batista's retirement match at WM 35. That was fun as hell and Triple H showed his most vicious side sincew the RA Era.

(I'm excluding the most famous or typically recommended stuff like the Bryan match or the Ronda mixed tag, but those obviously are fantastic matches too. I just wanted to focus on more underrated stuff.)

As you can notice, I'm only recommending a couple of matches per year (sometimes even less), and considering how many opportunities he had throughout all those years(or gave himself), that's totally a failure of a main event career. For every great match or performance he has had, he had a lot more of dissapointing, mediocre or even garbage stuff, some of it even working with good wrestlers and bringing their worst version out of them (thinking of you, Shawn). But he still had more pretty good, some even excellent matches to his resume after his 2000-01 peak.

I'm not trying to encourage people to reconsider Triple H's candidacy. I won't vote for him because, as Cap said, the bad stuff totally outweights the good stuff, and for the worst reason possible: he choose to be that way, to ruin wrestlers and matches just to keep his career alive. But I dislike that theory that he wasn't able to have good matches after 2001, so I wanted to share some of his cool stuff from the last two decades, that's all.