Zack Sabre Jr. one of the 32 participants in the critically-acclaimed Cruiser-weight Classic back in 2016, won the Wrestling Observer Newsletter’s Best Technical Wrestler award for 2017. This award also called the Bryan Danielson aka Daniel Bryan award (because Bryan won it a whopping nine times in a row between 2005 and 2013), is awarded to that wrestler that shows the most skill as a pure grapple.

This isn’t about flashy moves, aerial moves, or demonstrating senseless violence; it’s about that wrestler that shows intelligence in the ring through careful and logical movements and telling a story by using the simplest and most ‘natural’ of moves inside the ring.

Other great wrestlers to have won this award include late Chris Benoit, Kurt Angle, Jushin ‘Thunder’ Liger, Dean Malenko and the original Tiger Mask. Zack Sabre, Jr. won this award by a wide margin, winning more than three times as many votes as Kushida, the runner-up. Apart from those two, the remaining contenders for the award each received a handful of votes.

Those voted for included: Bullet Club member Marty Scurll, Pete Dunne, Matt Riddle, Katsuyori Shibata, Johnny Gargano, and Kazuchika Okada. Although all of these names wrestlers are fantastic grapplers, in many fans’ eyes they cannot hold a candle to ZSJ in terms of pure grappling skill.