Who is Dave Meltzer's Favourite Wrestler?

Introducing a new interpretation of the Dave Meltzer star rating system, and using it to determine Dave Meltzer's all-time favourite wrestler.

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about Dave Meltzer’s star rating system for wrestling matches, and how it seems like every match gets at least four stars these days. Just for fun, I went and checked who the top rated wrestlers of all time were according to Dave’s stars, and this is the list:

Ouch.

I understand that wrestling is subjective, and that all matches being reviewed by one person is of course going to result in a slanted viewpoint, but this is a really bad list, and I’ll explain why.

According to Dave Meltzer’s star rating system, the best wrestler of all time is Kento Miyahara. Good for him. I will admit to having never ever watched a Kento Miyahara match, because he’s wrestled an entire career in All-Japan Pro Wrestling. All respect in the world to AJPW, but is it even a major promotion anymore?

When you think of All-Japan Pro Wrestling, you (or at least I) close your eyes and think about the packed buildings to see Kenta Kobashi, Mitsuharu Misawa, and people of that ilk.

It has no major TV deal (international or domestic) these days, and only recently was allowed back into their old stomping grounds, the Nippon Budokon, for the first time in 18 years, because they can’t fill it anymore, so like I said, I have respect for Kento Miyahara, but should being on top of this promotion qualify you to be seen as the best wrestler in the world?

In second place is Will Ospreay, who for a lot of his career was saddled with the same problem. Ilja Dragunov is touch and go, but the majority of his work wasn’t seen by very many. Kenny Omega in fourth place is the first you get to who did most of his best in a major promotion (NJPW), but you run into a lot of the same problem on this list.

If these people can all average around 4.5 stars (out of a theoretical five), then how come they aren’t on top of the major promotions? This is where Dave’s rating system brings itself into disrepute. Why are all the best wrestlers of all time currently wrestling, and why are almost none of them the true top guys?

I’m going to make an effort to solve both of those problems. It’s going to be easier than you think.

This idea was brought into my mind during a conversation I was having with

Team Ninja Shark

, where they were complaining about every match these days being systematically rated higher than every match that happened prior to the year 2017. I had no data whatsoever to prove or disprove this, but it felt true anecdotally, so I decided to go and get some data. Little did I know how right we were.

After the average star rating had been roughly constant for a period of almost 30 years, all of a sudden in 2013 the average star rating spikes to 2.97, never to get back down to the comfortable 2.5 ever again.

Later in that same conversation, I proposed the idea of a Meltzer percentage, where the thought process around the Dave Meltzer rating system would change to the following:

For 33 years (1984-2017) Dave Meltzer rated matches on a five star scale, where five is the highest possible score, and -5 is the lowest possible score. However, on January 4, 2017, this changed forever when Dave awarded Kenny Omega vs Kazuchika Okada a score of six.

My Meltzer percentage theory would dictate that at this moment the scale forever changes. Dave cannot have his cake and eat it too. You cannot rate a match six stars on a five star scale. Therefore, from January 4, 2017 and forever thereafter, matches are now rated out of six. Under this new system a five star match is now just 5/6, for an 83% Meltzer percentage, roughly as good as a 4.25 star match under the old five star system.

On June 11, 2017, the scale again forever changed to being rated out of 6.25, and stayed this way for roughly half a year, until on June 9th 2018, when the scale morphed into its current form, where Kenny Omega vs Kazuchika Okada was awarded seven stars, therefore fundamentally transforming the scale one final time.

In the current era, a five star match is just 5/7, or a 71.4% Meltzer percentage, roughly equivalent to a 3.5 under the old five star scale, which to me explains the proliferation of five star matches in the modern day. We’ve all taken high school tests. 71.4% is just not that difficult of a score to achieve.

Dave still pretends a five star match is something worth striving for, but were you ever happy with a 71.4% on your test? He has to do this, because he has newsletters to sell, but I don’t. I can acknowledge that five star matches are not what they used to be.

To validate my theory, here is the graph of how Meltzer Percentage has changed over time:

You can see that when looking at things this way you can see that, although Dave hated the Attitude Era (and loved 2015 and 2016), his ratings have mostly stayed stable over time around the 50% area.

Don’t be fooled because 3.5 > 2.5. Half of seven is just as good as half of five according to my Meltzer Percentage statistic. He simply changed scales without telling anybody to make current wrestlers look better. Why? Because he’s selling a product to the current wrestling fans. They want to believe their guys are the best of all time.

This is not my goal. In that same conversation with

Team Ninja Shark

, they suggested that if Dave had changed the scale, he ought to do the math for us, but I got an even better idea.

Why don’t I do it?

I set about creating a dataset of every match Dave Meltzer ever reviewed, which proved to be much more difficult than I anticipated, but I did eventually finish the job. The resulting dataset can be accessed at this link, but do take care not to fall down the rabbit hole like I did.

Looking over this data, it becomes clear that Dave thinks the top end of the wrestling business is as poor as its ever been. The longest period without a 100% match (5/5 or 6/6 or 7/7) in history had been the five plus years between March 31, 2006 (Dragon Kid & Genki Horiguchi & Ryo Saito vs CIMA & Masato Yoshino & Naruki Doi in ROH) and July 17th, 2011 (John Cena vs CM Punk in WWE).

I will admit the main event scene in the big companies between 2006 and 2011 was a little weak, but (according to Dave) not as weak as the dry spell we are in right now, as there has not been a 100% (7/7) match since June 11, 2018, well over six years ago. There’s not been a 95% match (the old 4.75/5) over the interceding six years either. Just recently AEW got close, with Ospreay vs Danielson scoring a 6.5/7 in April, but Dave just could not give it that 100% (or 95%) distinction.

Contrary to the popular narrative, it’s quite clear to me that Dave is really not a fan of modern wrestling, because ever since AEW came around there’s not been any truly top tier matches either in that company or in WWE or in NJPW or anywhere else. Except for the one Danielson vs Ospreay match, there’s not even been a 90% match since 2018.

I’m not sure I can agree with that, but for this piece we are speaking strictly in Dave’s opinion, which is not an opinion that’s especially complimentary of modern wrestling. In fact, it’s an opinion that thinks the current era is the worst era of wrestling since he began reviewing in 1984. I’m beginning to understand why Dave has changed his scale. It’s a crafty move on his part.

Imagine if Dave had kept the same old scale, and just one match (Danielson vs Ospreay) had been rated better than four stars since 2018. Could you imagine the internet fanboys coming after him? I wouldn’t want to subject myself to that either.

Personally, I could surely come up with an argument that at least one match from the last six years would be worthy of 100% consideration, but this is Dave’s scale not mine, and I’m going to use it to answer a fun little question that came to my head: who is Dave Meltzer’s favourite wrestler?

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Here is my methodology:

I said before I wanted to consider only top guys and take the bias away from the current people. The latter has already done with the implementation of Meltzer Percentage, which puts a significant handicap on current wrestlers (by virtue of the fact that Dave is just not a very big fan of modern wrestling). The former is going to be done with a simple floor on the number of Dave reviewed matches required to qualify for this list.

I set 60 Dave-reviewed matches as the floor to be qualified for consideration. Considering Dave does not review every match a wrestler has ever wrestled, this is a fairly stringent barrier. It leaves out Charlotte Flair, Johnny Gargano, Austin Aries, Billy Gunn, and Chad Gable, all currently on 59 Dave-reviewed matches, but it does manage to keep Brian Pillman, Sasha Banks, Hernandez, and Bobby Eaton (all on 60).

There is a reason I set the floor at 60.

There are three ways to reward performance. You can reward the worst (giving bonuses to wrestlers who never have bad matches). You can reward the middle (giving bonuses to wrestlers whose average match is better than others’ average matches, even without any five star classics), or you can reward top-end performance (give rewards to those who perform exceptionally at their best, even if there’s the odd stinker thrown in).

Those who know my NFL work know that I’m a big time top-end performance guy, so in lieu of understanding Dave’s preferences in wrestlers I’m going to use my own, and implement a formula that heavily rewards having matches at or near the 100 percent mark. I’m actually going to grade wrestlers exactly the same way I grade quarterbacks.

Each wrestler gets to throw out the bottom 20% of their sample, therefore ignoring the bad stuff entirely, and focusing only on the best parts of a wrestler’s performance (according to Dave). This also rewards a long career, because Brian Pillman (with his 60 Dave-reviewed matches) gets to throw out just his 12 worst matches. However, Kazuchida Okada (with his 351 Dave-reviewed matches) gets to throw out 70.

From here, I will make the assumption that more great wrestling is better. A 30 minute long 100% match is strictly better than a 20 minute long 100% match. This is the easiest nit to pick with my entire formulation, and I can understand how some would easily call foul on this point, but I need it in order to tabulate the scores in the way I would like.

I will tabulate the scores using weighted percent average, using the wrestler’s time in the ring as the weight, to find Dave Meltzer’s favourite wrestler of all time.

One unfortunate issue is that due to current data restrictions, this exercise had to be done gimmick-wise. A different name (for the purposes of this exercise) means a different wrestler. For instance, Mitsuharu Misawa gets no credit for being Tiger Mask II. Perhaps I will do this exercise once more in the future, correcting for these issues, but for now we must deal with them.

With all the methodology out of the way, let’s get to the results.

Forgive me for the excessively big table. I’m still figuring out this DataWrapper thing.

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And the winner is Toshiaki Kawada!

Being honest with ourselves, I think we all knew it was going to be the four pillars of AJPW, and there they all are, 1-2-3-4. It’s nice to see the one man wrestling promotion Kawada (being the only one who didn’t jump off the sinking All-Japan ship in 2000) take the top spot on this list, buoyed by an incredible 43742 seconds spent in matches with a 100% (5/5 in Kawada’s day) Meltzer Percentage. That’s 12 hours and nine minutes. Remember that not one wrestler has taken a single breath in a 100% match since 2018, and it gives you a clear perspective of how much Dave loved this man.

How about Ricky Steamboat holding it down for the North Americans in a top ten that could’ve easily been entirely Japanese? Ricky Steamboat only got to be in five 100% matches (all against Ric Flair in some fashion), but he made his nights count, pumping two hours and 45 minutes worth of five star action into those five nights.

Infamously, a man who did not spend a single second in a 100% match is Kurt Angle, who still gets all the way up to 11th on the Dave Meltzer’s favourites list due to having only 30 of his 197 Dave-reviewed matches falling below the 50 percent barrier, meaning he had so few poor matches that he got to throw out every single one of them, plus some okay matches too.

One thing I did not expect to see is that Dave Meltzer really really really likes John Cena. He likes him better than the Young Bucks and Will Ospreay. I did not remember it being this way, but in John Cena’s 188 matches, he averaged 72.4 Meltzer Percent, which on the current seven star scale is a five star match. In John Cena’s five star era this is a 3.5 star average, which is better than almost all of his contemporaries.

John comes perilously close to Kenny Omega’s 72.9 percent average, and could you imagine the fallout if I could credibly argue that Dave Meltzer liked John Cena better than Kenny Omega?

John got to spend about 40 minutes in a 100% match with CM Punk in 2011, and he also was one third of a 95% match at the 2015 Royal Rumble, kicking off a 2015 that saw John have four matches that were 90% or better, plus two 85 percents, and change his legacy from that of a WWE created champion to a legitimately very good in-ring wrestler. It took a while but he got there, and ended up above everybody in WWE history except Shawn Michaels, Kurt Angle, and Chris Benoit on the Dave Meltzer list.

Not bad for a guy who ‘couldn’t wrestle.’

You can go down the chart yourself and see every one of the 204 featured wrestlers (shout out Chase Owens for being Dave Meltzer’s all-time least favourite wrestler), but there is one more point I need to make. There are no current wrestlers anywhere. With Kenny Omega not actively wrestling currently, that means just three (#8 Naomichi Marufuji, #9 Jun Akiyama, #12 Katsuyori Shibata) of Dave’s top 20 favourite wrestlers are still actively wrestling.

Jun is not going to have any more 100% matches. I have serious doubts about the other two, and if John Cena makes good on his promise to go full time in 2025 this number will jump to four, but I’m not sure I foresee any seven star John Cena matches at this stage of the game. On the Dave scale, the best wrestlers still going are the Young Bucks and Kazuchika Okada, and both these acts have never been colder.

From the Dave perspective, it’s a glum path ahead for pro wrestling, unless some younger wrestlers step up quickly to start filling shoes.

Of course, if we take a step back from the Dave perspective, it’s looking really good for pro wrestling right now, which reveals this exercise as the silly bit of fun it always was to begin with.

Thank you for engaging in my silly bit of pro wrestling math geek analysis, and hopefully you got anything out of this at all.