WWE Money In The Bank Results (6/18/17): Five Thoughts On The Show

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WWE Money In The Bank is in the books. WWE’s fourth most important PPV (sorry, Survivor Series) of the year is a SmackDown Live brand-exclusive show this time around, and in traditional SmackDown fashion, it was weird as hell.

The smaller card for this show is something to be taken as a positive with two Money In The Bank ladder matches taking place, and three championships on the line. One thing I’ve brought up in my SmackDown Live recaps is the fact that sometimes the two hour time slot – while it makes for a much easier watch than the three-hour Raw – doesn’t allow for the show to put on a ton of memorable matches. It’s common for even main events to only go ten minutes or less, leading to marquee matchups live Kevin Owens vs. Shinsuke Nakamura being inconsequential throw-away matches. Thankfully, only five scheduled bouts (plus one added) over the course of three hours solved that problem.

With every match on the card carrying high stakes, Money In The Bank was easily one of the most highly-anticipated brand-exclusive PPVs we’ll get all year. Could the Blue Team live up to the expectations? Which men and women would be walking out with the belts and briefcases? And, to pose a question that will undoubtedly come up a few hundred times in the coming months, would we see a cash-in tonight? Read on to find out!

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1. Great, You Made Me Hate James Ellsworth, You Bastards

Well, this was something.

The match started off pretty enjoyable, too. Outside of a cringe-worthy moment early on where Natalya climbs the ladder and reaches for the belt as efficiently as a newborn baby trying to dress themselves, everything was going smoothly. They were physical, but not out of control. The Charlotte corkscrew from the top rope to the outside to take out Natty and Tamina was the awesome Charlotte spot we knew we’d get at some point in the night. And really, it was just a cool match to watch. It’s easy to make fun of WWE for shoving the “making history” rhetoric down our throats, but when you remove that part of it, and just focus on the fact that they really are making history, it makes what you’re watching feel like something. If I’d have told you two years ago you’d see an image of Carmella reaching up at the top of a ladder, you’d have thought I had gotten a bad batch.

Anyway, everything goes off the rails when Ellsworth dumps Becky off the ladder while she’s reaching for the briefcase. After trying and failing to bring Carmella to her feet, he decides to take it upon himself to climb the ladder, pull down the briefcase, and toss it to her. Carmella catches it, and the bell rings. Then while referees then have a discussion about whether or not they can allow this, Ellsworth, all-powerful for reasons unclear to everyone, grabs a mic and announces Carmella as the winner.

My take: this is a garbage finish. If you’re WWE and you spend nearly every waking moment preaching “WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT” and spend weeks selling on us this “first-ever” women’s Money In The Bank ladder match being a milestone for women’s wrestling, it is complete horseshit to have James Ellsworth be the person to pull down the briefcase.

The most fascinating part to me was watching the emotional roller coaster that the crowd in St.Louis went on during this whole thing. Ellsworth looking up and contemplating climbing the ladder gets a huge pop and “YES” chant. He climbs the ladder, and it gets a little louder. He grabs the briefcase and throws it down to Carmella, the bell rings, and then…mostly just confused silence it seemed like. Then, Ellsworth makes the announcement, and the crowd starts to boo. I think that’s a process a lot of us went through.

Going in, I was all for a Carmella win. She and Ellsworth had always been the perfect people to spend the next ‘X’ amount of weeks sporting the briefcase and cutting promos with it. But this sucked, man. I really look forward to how they use these two going forward, and I’m sure most of it will be pretty good, but I’m not sure if the route they took to get there was really worth it.

*Side note from this match: a commentary trope they absolutely have to kill immediately is the one where when a wrestler uses a submission move in a match in which you can’t win by submission, the announce team always says something similar to what JBL said tonight. Natty locks in a Sharpshooter, and he explains that she did this because “her instincts took over” or something. They could so very easily explain why it makes sense logically for Natty to do the Sharpshooter here (locking that on is going to put tremendous strain on the lower back, which would effect one of her opponent throughout the rest of the match), but instead, they imply that she did it by accident. They always assume the character did it mistakenly or didn’t know the rules of the match. This is dumb and needs to stop. Moving on…

(Click next below to continue the Money In The Bank review)

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2. The Usos’ Day One Remains H

The Usos defend the SmackDown Tag Team Championships against Kofi Kingston and Big E of The New Day, and I actually loved the match. I’m sure there’ll be a ton of people who hated the finish, but I’m giving it a pass because it made kayfabe sense, and that’s usually all I ask for. The Usos came inches away from losing the titles on several occasions, and after the last time, they just decide that things weren’t going their way and it was time to cut their losses and do what they had to do to hold onto the belts by getting counted out. It’s a chickenshit move, obviously, but they’re heels. If you got mad about this ending, consider yourself worked.

(Note: the important difference here between this and the Women’s MITB match is that if you don’t like this finish because you feel like it’s an “eff you” to the fans, then okay, that’s how you feel. But the finish in the opening match was an “eff you” to the people in it.)

Again, the match itself was excellent. Nobody really mentions Kofi Kingston when they discuss the best sellers in WWE, but man, Kofi can take a beating. The Usos, as is the norm lately, were fantastic, too. The ring psychology at work by them – stretching the rules because they know they can’t lose the titles via DQ, collaborating to work body parts, knowing what you’re partner is thinking and knowing where to be and when to be there – are the things that make us love teams like The Revival. Any time one Uso was in trouble, whether is was taking the Midnight Hour or the Big Ending, the other was there to make the save. Pulling the ring rope down right after an irish whip (a brutal bump by Kofi) and teaming up to work Kingston’s leg before transitioning right into a submission were a couple of my favorite moments. I also loved Kofi’s top rope “Trust Fall” onto the outside to take out both Usos. And the Splash that was not quite caught by Big E would have been a great spot had they nailed the execution.

Just some great wrestling in this one, and we can all look forward to this feud progressing and us getting at least one more big match out of it.

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3. WWE Hates Naomi With The Fire Of 1,000 Suns

The third match of the night was Naomi defending her SmackDown Women’s Title against Lana. I’d just like to start by saying Lana was fine here. Okay? Okay.

Lana surprisingly controls a large portion of this match, even taking Naomi to Suplex City at one point (read: two consecutive snap suplexes). She works Naomi’s leg. She hits her with her Sit-Down Spinebuster for a near-fall. They let Naomi who, it should be noted here, has been pinned by virtually the entire women’s roster during her title reign, really get taken to task by Lana for awhile here. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but none of this makes me believe WWE thinks much of Naomi at this point. I get that “she’s the champion” is a pretty valid counter-argument to that, but if you’re trying to sell us on Naomi as a top-tier woman in the division, getting worked over by Lana isn’t going to accomplish that very well.

The match culminates with a Carmella fake-cash-in that literally could not have been more pointless. I guess they thought that the match needed some sort or wrinkle, or maybe they just wanted to throw in a fake swerve for the sake of a fake swerve, I don’t know. But after that, Naomi counters another attempt from Lana for the Spinebuster and locks her into a submission, forcing her to tap.

I imagine this was a one-off for Naomi and Lana, but who knows? There’s still one more PPV to fill before Summerslam, where you’d have to assume Charlotte will be involved. A rematch wouldn’t be out of the question, but neither would a Carmella cash-in leading to a Carmella-Naomi title match at Battleground. SmackDown was run two consecutive angles now with five or six women involved, so it’ll be interesting to see how closely everyone stays involved in the title picture, and who emerges if they’re not running it back with Lana.

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4. The Maharaj-Era Continues

WWE Champion (the first time I noticed they dropped “World Heavyweight” from the title, if you’re interested to know how closely I’ve been paying attention to these two) Jinder Mahal underwent his first title defense tonight against Randy Orton. Most of the match centers around Orton going for the RKO, Mahal countering, and going back to working him over. He takes it to Orton’s knee, and it has the same methodical pace you’re used to seeing from these two.

The ending sequence of the match is filled with stupid “why would this person make this decision” problems, so that hurts the match a lot. First, Orton hits the RKO, but when he goes for the cover, Singh Brother A puts Mahal’s foot on the rope to break the count. The referee catches them, and after some back and forth that involves the Singh Brother begging the referee to disqualify Mahal, the Singh brothers get tossed out of the match. This is dumb because if the Singh Brothers wanted Mahal to get DQ’ed, they didn’t have to plead with the referee to DQ them for the ‘foot on the rope’ interference. They could have just jumped into the ring and started kicking the crap out of Orton while he was lying on the ground, and there you go.

Instead of leaving, the Singh Brothers get in the faces of the various WWE legends at ringside (Greg Gagne, Larry Hennig, Baron Von Raschke, Sgt. Slaughter, Ric Flair, and Orton’s Dad, “Cowboy” Bob Orton), and they end up grabbing Papa Orton by the shirt. Randy, who’s recovered, goes berserk and destroys both of them for like, at least three full minutes. The referee I guess just made the decision to not count Randy out, which is the second dumb thing to happen in this sequence.

Eventually, Orton heads back into the ring, and apparently he’s expended all his energy on the Singhs, because Mahal quickly plants him with a Khallas and picks up the win. So, just to summarize what WWE wants to convey to us here, the heels make bad choices, the babyfaces make bad choices, the referees make bad choices, and we should just be impressed that everyone was able to find their way to the arena for the show.

I know they already did a count-out finish earlier in the night, but at least Orton getting counted out because he lost his mind seeing the Singh Brothers putting their hands on his Dad would have had some logic behind it. Whatever. Just please let this be the end of Mahal-Orton and give these guys some kind of shot to enter into a program that has a chance at working.

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5. ‘Predictable’ Doesn’t Necessarily Equal ‘Bad’

The main event of the show is the men’s Money In The Bank ladder match. It gets started early when Baron Corbin beats the holy hell out of Shinsuke Nakamura while he’s coming down to the ring, because Corbin is the best and depriving everyone of Nakamura’s entrance is probably the most heel shit you can do in 2017 WWE. Corbin is the answer to the question every time somebody’s watching wrestling and asks “if those two guys want to kill each other so much, why are they standing next to each other not fighting?” Nine times out of ten, if he’s in the vicinity of someone he doesn’t like, he’s just going to beat them up. He doesn’t have time for entrances and promos. If he can attack a guy who doesn’t know it’s coming, and he knows there will be no repercussions for doing it, by god, he’s doing it. You have to appreciate that.

The match itself was a lot of fun. Sami and K.O. continue their blood feud with Zayn throwing Owens off the top rope and into a ladder (there’s even a little extra payoff there, with Sami trying to climb the ladder but can’t, because Owens had broken it). Zayn also brought the house down with a Sunset Flip Sit-Down Powerbomb off of the ladder on Ziggler, as well as the suplex on Owens onto the ring apron. I also popped for A.J.’s Phenomenal Forearm to knock Zayn off the ladder shortly after.

There are a bunch of other good-to-great spots as well, A.J. putting Owens onto the ladder that laid on the ring steps and the look on Dolph Ziggler’s face after pulling the ladder out from Styles and watching him fall to his doom both stand out. But the match really gets going when Nakamura makes his way out and starts handing out knees to the head like they’re Halloween candy. The face off between he and Styles had is a genuinely great moment, where they’re both standing at the ladder and realize that both of them climbing isn’t an option. The fight comes to a head when Nakamura runs at A.J. to hit him with the knee, and Styles jumps up to cut him off with a forearm, they’re both stunned for a minute, then recover and climb the ladder to battle there. Before long however, Baron Corbin runs in to dump them both off the ladder, climb on up, and grab the briefcase to become Mr. Money in the Bank.

Corbin winning is something many people predicted, but that in no way means it was a bad move. Most people predicted Corbin simply because it made the most sense. Remember back in 2012 when Sheamus won the Rumble, and (by most accounts) this was done because too many people sniffed out a Jericho win and WWE didn’t want the ending to be too obvious? Well, nobody on the planet was happy that Sheamus won the Rumble, so unpredictable isn’t always what we want. Sometimes you just have to go with what makes the most sense, and Baron Corbin winning Money in the Bank makes the most sense right now.

It was a solid match, with more than a couple great spots, and we got to see six guys who are all capable of putting on a good show do just that. They really allowed both Nakamura and Zayn to have showcase performances here, which they both needed greatly. Just about everyone had high spots in the match (except for maybe Ziggler) and they did a good job for the most part navigating all the ladder match pitfalls that end up bogging so many of them down.

(Click next below for final thoughts on the show)

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Other Notes From The Show

The pre-show match gave us the return of Zack Ryder, as he rejoined his old tag partner Mojo Rawley to take on the Colons. This was one of the most “PRE-SHOW” pre-show matches you’ll get, but it was cool to get the reappearance of the trademark Spastic Mojo Rawley Hot-Tag, so there’s that. The Hype Bros pick up the win, and if nothing else, it’s nice to get another tag team into the mix over on the SmackDown roster. It’s been a four-team division since the return of The New Day, and I know we’re all still upset that Gable and Jordan are stuck in the Upside Down, but we have to move on eventually.

(I know all the rumors say that American Alpha is going to be back as early at this Tuesday, I just really wanted to get that super-relevant Stranger Things joke in).

The show opens with the HISTORY-MAKING FIRST EVER women’s Money In The Bank ladder match video package, and it’s dope. I know it’s been said a million times before, but I really hope whoever puts together these PPV video packages and montages gets paid what they deserve.

FASHION VICE! FASHION VICE! FASHION VICE!

Fandango (with Paul E.’s giant cell phone) meets up with Breezy and tells him that someone is going to be sending them intel on who trashed their ‘Fashion Files’ office last week. This leads to Tyler finding a VHS tape that says “watch me” outside their door, and the shady characters on the tape telling them to meet them in the ring tonight. Along the way we get Breeze pulling a water gun on a fax machine and some Michael Jackson references. Would you like to know why this is the best? This is the best because they didn’t do ‘Fashion Vice’ because they were in Miami. There was nothing at all prompting them to do a ‘Miami Vice’-themed version of ‘Fashion Files.’ They did it because they fucking felt like it. That’s why it’s the best.

Anyway, Breezango’s opponents tonight end up being The Ascension (and not a heel American Alpha) and they beat them in a couple minutes on a roll-up pin. LOL.

Mike Bennett and Maria Kanellis are made their debut at Money in the Bank, except they came out to an 80’s-style rock ballad, they are super in love, and Mike Bennett is Mike Kanellis now. I’m sure we’ll go into more detail on these two in the near future, but until then, just know that this gimmick is going to be wonderful and it’s going to get SO MUCH HEAT.

Final Thoughts

Money In The Bank, just like SmackDown, had that “weird in a good way” feel to it for most of it. When you run down the results, it reads as a bunch of stuff I didn’t love (the Ellsworth finish, Naomi taking too much offense from Lana, Jinder Mahal and Randy Orton being on TV), but I actually thought it was a pretty good show. The best thing about the end of a PPV like this is how many different directions there are to go from here. We assume that A.J. and Owens will reengage into their U.S. Title feud, but outside of that, there’s a lot up in the air. We don’t know for sure who Mahal ends up matching up with (especially with Cena now classified as a Free Agent), we might get a Nakamura-Corbin program, but then that frees up Sami Zayn to do something different. Ziggler and Orton are both freed up as well. Throw Mike Bennett and Rusev into the mix, and SmackDown Live has a whole lot of options on how to proceed from here. They’ll continue to struggle with time management from having so many names they’re going to want to get onto the show every week, but at the end of the day, there’s certainly worse problems to have than “too much talent.”

What did everyone else think of the show? Let us know below in the comments!