The Good
For Raw, the fatal four way between the women competitors for the Money in the Bank ladder match was a really good match. It featured Ember Moon, Natalya, Alexa Bliss, and Sasha Banks with Natalya ending up the winner. The match was fast paced and had a lot of close pinfalls and every women got the chance to show what they got. Overall, this was a great opening match for the show and it helped build up the women’s ladder match from the Raw point of view.
For Smackdown, they had two “first time ever” matches on their show this week and both matches were great. Shinsuke Nakamura faced off against Jeff Hardy and Samoa Joe fought Rusev. Joe and Rusev had the Miz as a special guest referee which put an entertaining twist on the match, and it had a surprising result as Rusev won. On the other match, Nakamura and Hardy put on a good back and forth match only for Nakamura to DQ himself by hitting Hardy with a low blow (Nakamura is a great bad guy so I was expecting that). Both of these matches helped build Smackdown’s biggest matches for the PPV.
The Bad
For Raw, we saw the B team face off against Heath Slater and Rhyno for what feels like the 100th time. I understand trying to build up the B Team as they get ready for their tag team championship match, but facing off against the same team week after week won’t help that build.
For Smackdown, remember when they said that they would have Andrade Almas face off against Sin Cara this week? Well, that didn’t happen. It is very frustrating as a viewer when you are promised something is going to happen and then it doesn’t happen. They didn’t even announce that the match was pushed back either, they just didn’t have it.
The Final Verdict
Both shows did a pretty good job of putting on proper buildup on the go home show before Money in the Bank. Both shows built up their title programs as well as the Money in the Bank ladder matches. Raw had a much better main event than Smackdown though as they had a fatal four way with the men in the ladders match while Smackdown basically put all their women competitors in a 10-women tag match. With that said, I will have to say that Raw had the better show this week. The segments that they had for the PPV flowed better than the promos on Smackdown. Along with that, the matches they had to build up their matches made more sense. While Smackdown did have some dream matches that were great to watch, they need to have proper buildup for these matches in the future so that they have a bigger feel to them. Money in the Bank is turning out to look like a great PPV and hopefully it follows through as a good show!
