Wrestling’s 20 Greatest Finishers of All Time

There’s no getting up from these wrestling finishing moves…

Every wrestler needs a great finishing move. It signals the end of the match and helps a wrestler carve out their own identity. Without finishers, many of the greatest moments in wrestling and victories would never have happened.

Sadly, the basic premise of the finisher as the match-ending move has begun to shift in recent years. Repetition breeds contempt, and many fans got tired of seeing the same finishers being used to end matches. So over time, wrestlers starting kicking out of finishers, to a point where they could hardly be considered finishers at all.

This is where we find ourselves today. You can’t watch a big wrestling match without expecting at least one finisher to be kicked out of. John Cena is a prime example of this mentality in action. He does his signature ‘superstar comeback’ and hoists his opponent up for his finisher, the Attitude Adjustment. They drop down, get a little for of momentum, then get hoisted up and slammed down with the move, only to kick out at two. The same is true for the reverse; Cena (and other top guys in WWE and elsewhere) eat multiple finishers in a match, rendering those finishers useless.

That said, some finishers are simply awesome sights to behold, whether they’re kicked out of or not. Some moves look so elegant, devastating or downright shocking that they’ve become immortalized as the best finishers in wrestling history. That’s where this list comes in. Here we will look at the twenty greatest wrestling finishers of all time. These are the most impressive, difficult, dangerous and timeless moves ever created.

No matter how much the wrestling industry evolves and changes, people will still be remembering these moves years to come.