Roderick Strong

[WingedEagle]

He doesn't have main events for national promotions with the accompanying stakes, drama and promotional machines behind him. But he does have nearly 20 years of absolutely crushing it in big and small match settings up and down the card in a variety of roles and styles. Why isn't he among the top few dozen to ever do it?

[Tetsujin]

On 1/2/2022 at 8:37 AM, Tetsujin said:

Gotta say he was the last wrestler that made me enjoy ROH back in 2015 against Jay Lethal. His NXT stuff has obviously been a total blast. Excellent tag and midcard worker, and he improved a lot as a heel compared to his pre-WWE career. The Danielson match is amazing, but I need to watch much more of his indy stuff to see if it holds up, I'm specially interested in his PWG and ROH work, but any hidden gem like some of the matches Clayton spoke about will be well received as well.

After this last year or so in AEW, he's definitely been adding more to his case. Great performances all the time, and playing different roles: he can be a wounded underdog against a monster (vs Joe), or the other way around being himself that very monster (vs Orange), he can match Ospreay's pace or chain wrestle with KOR. He can be pathetic in a comedy angle (the Devil stuff, where he put over his neck collar), but he can also goe toe to toe with the world champion (vs Swerve). Even outside the ring, he added some of his best character and mic work ever.

I've also been loving his PWG stuff, he worked as a heel much better than I remembered there. On the other hand, some of his early ROH stuff has been a little bit dissapointing, as I don't think he found his thing until the early to mid 10s, and his work was a bit generic and too "by the book" until then.

A pretty great wrestler overall, that's for sure. Incredible offense, one of the only current guys that make combos of moves look cool and feel meaningful. Underrated bumper and seller, too. He's definitely more of an input guy, but even without a lot of MOTYCs he still has plenty of very good and great matches in three different decades now.  At the moment, he's in the back half of my list, and closer to top 75 than "just" top 100.