Heading to One Night Stand

The two week build between Judgment Day and One Night Stand has been rather hit and miss.
Much of this might be due to the recent suspension of William Regal who it seemed was being pushed for an even bigger role.

In the big main events we've had Cena and HHH laid out by JBL and Orton, setting up their decision for extreme stipulation. Cena/JBL will be a first blood match, while Orton/HHH will be a replay of their best match in the last year, a Last Man Standing Match. Whether Orton and Hunter can capture lightning in a bottle twice is difficult to predict. This match will either finally move Orton away from the WWE Championship chase for a while, or provide another short HHH run.

The opening segment to tonight's (05.26.08) Raw, was one of the better interactions between the two of late. Orton actually played the wounded babyface, reminding Hunter of how HHH's ego can never let someone live with the top spot over him. Meanwhile HHH reminds Orton that he was groomed to be the future, but couldn't handled the pressure once he was champ. It was one of those worked interactions that had a twinge of shoot interjected. What it really was meant to do is make us buy a PPV so close to the last two for yet another Orton-HHH match. It moved us to that direction so it was a success.

Other than that opening, and another interesting match between Y2J and HBK thrown in for whatever reason, the go-home RAW was rather lacklustre.

We had innumerable vignettes where talent interacted with Mr. Mahon after his enigmatic pronouncement that he was going to reward the audience (appreciate us I guess) with a big announcement. The tease continued throughout the night.

There was a sloppy match between Kennedy and Carlito, who seems to be phoning it in at this point, which led to Kennedy received a British beatdown from Paul Burchill and Katie Lea referencing their departed countryman Regal. Kennedy is fully a babyface now and he's finding it isn't easy to draw decent rivalries from that side of the ring when there are already more than enough main event faces working RAW.

Which leads us to the McMahon announcement, some of which we knew, some of which we didn't. First the known, next month will see a new WWE Draft where hopefully all three brands find some shakeups and some new storylines that give the audience something fresh. The second announcement is clearly a ratings push to end all ratings pushes. Vince will give away $1 million every week to someone- the details were sketchy (naturally) but I'm sure it will picque the interest of fans and the mainstream media- which is what Vince was/is hoping for.

How ECW and Smackdown set up their pieces of One Night Stand will be interesting. How much carnage can we expect at the hardcore night of no holds barred? Check in later this week for predictions and next week for a recap.