The 2025 Crownies: Tag Team of the Year, Most Improved, Best Promo and many more wrestling awards

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To steal from Uncrowned's fearless leader, Ariel Helwani, The Crownies are ... BACK ... IN ... YOUR ... LIFE!

The Uncrowned crew has already detailed the biggest winners across professional wrestling, but for our sanity — and your reading time — we opted to do a roundup awards article for some of the smaller, yet still important, categories.

Last year, we picked nine winners for the inaugural Crownies. This time around we're upping the ante, adding a 10th award. Ranging from Promo of the Year to Indie Wrestler of the Year, here are the honorees!

Gimmick of the Year: The Broke Bucks

Kel Dansby: If AEW's “Broke Bucks” gimmick gave off Baron Corbin circa 2021 vibes to you, you weren’t alone. But that also wasn’t a bad thing.

The Young Bucks spent much of 2024 riding high as arrogant EVPs, and the act was begging for a hard reset. How do you humble pro-wrestling executives? You strip them of everything. That simple idea became the genius of the “Broke Bucks” angle and fueled one of AEW’s most effective babyface turns.

The execution mattered. The gradual loss of pyro, entrance music, and even their name graphics were small but intentional touches that kept audiences engaged week to week. All of it built toward the Young Bucks’ “Million Dollar Match” at AEW Full Gear 2025, where they teamed with Josh Alexander to face Kenny Omega and Jurassic Express in a $1 million, winner-take-all trios match. The Bucks briefly aligned with Don Callis before ultimately choosing loyalty to Omega, reuniting The Elite and reclaiming the money in the rematch a few weeks later.

It was a storyline about ego, consequence and redemption. One that landed because it trusted patience and payoff.

Tag Team of the Year: The Hurt Syndicate

Cameron Hawkins: It’s hard to argue with dominance, and no team was more dominant in 2025 than The Hurt Syndicate.

Holding AEW’s World Tag Team Titles for just over seven months, Bobby Lashley and Shelton Benjamin restored some of that old Road Warriors feeling — a tandem that's simply too much for two opponents to compete with. For both to be more than two decades into their careers and still have the athleticism to fly around with younger talent speaks to their training and acumen, and when you add in one of the best mouthpieces in the business with MVP, it was the Syndicate’s best year in front of a live audience.

Maxxine Dupri becomes the Women's Intercontinental Champion during Monday Night RAW at Madison Square Garden on November 17, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Rich Freeda/WWE via Getty Images)

Most Improved: Maxxine Dupri

Raj Prashad: Maxxine Dupri’s hard work behind the scenes paid off with one of the most remarkable in-ring development stories of 2025. While performers like Kyle Fletcher and Oba Femi made impressive leaps from established talents to bona fide main-event players, Dupri’s growth stands alone. Her evolution from a novice with minimal wrestling experience into a fully credible singles competitor represents the kind of transformation WWE can only hope to replicate.

Extensive work at the Performance Center, combined with additional training in The Dungeon under Natalya Neidhart, resulted in visibly sharper in-ring execution and a far more confident presence. That commitment translated directly to results. Dupri closed the year by earning signature victories, including shocking wins over Becky Lynch and a meaningful Women’s Intercontinental Championship run.

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that Dupri’s ceiling is far higher than anyone initially imagined. Heading into 2026, the sky is genuinely the limit for how far she can go.

Swerve of the Year: Swerve Strickland

Drake Riggs: Whose house?! It's obviously Swerve Strickland.

What more needs to be said? The man delivered his typical banger matches as part of notable feuds, like aiding in Ricochet's heel turn and attempting to dethrone Jon Moxley. All while finding new ways to portray creative staple gun violence.

Best Manager/Non-Wrestler Character: Paul Heyman

Anthony Sulla-Heffinger: I'll probably petition to name this the Paul Heyman award at some point in the future because there's a case to be made for him to win it every year.

Heyman's brilliance extends both in front of and behind the camera, but because this is a strictly front-facing award, we'll focus on his work as one of the centerpieces of arguably WWE's biggest story of the year.

"The Wise Man" worked with Roman Reigns to start the year, tying a nice bow on his involvement with The Bloodline for a literal half-decade. Then, in a callback to 2024's WarGames match, Heyman walked Punk out for the main event of WrestleMania 41 Night 1. It was one of the year's most special moments and you could see the emotion in Heyman and Punk, affirming the truth that once you're a "Paul Heyman Guy" you're always a "Paul Heyman Guy."

What happened at the end of the match changed the trajectory of "WWE Raw" for the rest of 2025, as Heyman turned on both Punk and Reigns to align with Seth Rollins and create The Vision. Even after Rollins' shoulder injury, Heyman has helped to usher in the next era of WWE, working alongside Bron Breakker, Bronson Reed and now Austin Theory.

Heyman can elevate talent unlike any other manager in pro-wrestling today, both on-screen and backstage. It's what earned him both a WWE Hall of Fame nod and a Crownie this year.

Seth Rollins makes his entrance with his manager Paul Heyman with the intention of cashing in his Money in the Bank contract to take on CM Punk in the the WWE World Heavyweight Championship during the WWE 2025 SummerSlam at MetLife Stadium on August 02, 2025 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)

(Actual) Swerve of the Year: Seth Rollins' knee injury

Riggs: Consider yourself swerved with Swerve!

In all seriousness, wrestling delivered several excellent swerves throughout the year across the globe, but one stood out above the rest. While I personally despised this one — thanks to it coming at the expense of LA Knight — nothing worked over the collective wrestling audience more than Seth Rollins' fake knee injury.

It really was foolish on our parts, because WWE historically doesn't keep injured talent on-screen the way it did with Rollins. Rollins not only remained on "WWE Raw" briefly, but also appeared on platforms like "The Rich Eisen Show," claiming he'd be out for an unknown amount of time. It only added to the injury's believability when Rollins reminded viewers he'd injured himself before off the same move.

Ultimately, it was all a ruse to cash in his Money In the Bank contract on his bitter forever-rival — and newly-minted World Heavyweight Champion — CM Punk.

This type of sequence of events is truly the beauty of wrestling at its core. Although Rollins suffered his karma later on with a real shoulder injury, his SummerSlam steal was as epic as it gets.

Indie Wrestler of the Year: Maya World

Hawkins: It’s Maya’s world, we’re just living in it.

The Dallas-area native has turned her independent success into multiple appearances on AEW TV with tag-team partner Hyan, and big-time matches for ASÉ Wrestling, West Coast Pro, Houston’s New Texas Pro, Austin’s Inspire AD and Jersey Championship Wrestling, to name a few. She’s also one of the standout unsigned performers for Westside Gunn and Smoke DZA’s 4th Rope Wrestling, a card regularly featuring AEW and TNA talent. Getting on-the-job training from Texas veterans like Athena, Maya World was prepared to enter 2026 as one of the top American free agents — until signing a full-time deal with AEW just this past week.

Sulla-Heffinger: Although it was one of the biggest storylines of the year, it's undeniable that John Cena's heel run was polarizing, at best. Even though Cena didn't need to be a heel to have a successful feud with CM Punk — we saw a very cool moment pre-turn at Elimination Chamber — the change allowed for the "Never Seen 17" to breathe some fresh life into one of his iconic rivalries.

Cena recreating the moment that defined his story with Punk 15 years ago was pure brilliance. Cena's delivery had a biting arrogance to it, with callbacks that mirrored the promo that launched Punk into an all-new stratosphere during his initial WWE run. Considering the current wrestling landscape, his references to Claudio Castagnoli, Nic Nemeth and Matt Cardona had an added weight to them compared to Punk's wave to Colt Cabana. This wasn't just heel Cena at his best, it was Cena at his most excellent, winning over the Grand Rapids crowd with a truly transcendent moment.

Best Celebrity/Non-Wrestler Performance: Jelly Roll

Prashad: If you’d asked early in the year which celebrity would be in the running for this award, Travis Scott projected as the easy choice. Involved in a major, industry-shaking storyline with The Rock during John Cena’s heel turn, then factoring into Cena’s final WrestleMania, Scott seemed destined to run away with the top celebrity performance.

But as Scott faded from WWE programming altogether, Jelly Roll swooped in with an impressive display of his own. His commitment to training — punctuated by a long-running weight-loss journey that saw him drop nearly 200 pounds by SummerSlam — and his in-ring performance became a focal point of the show. Jelly Roll took some gnarly bumps, including a frog splash through the announce table, a Claymore, and another frog splash before suffering the pinfall loss. A celebrity willing to take those spots and the loss is rare. It feels like only a matter of time before he’s back in the ring again.

Best PPV/PLE: Double or Nothing 2025

Riggs: Double or Nothing 2025 was the best show of the year, and maybe only one other option came close. Personally, the show was an all-timer and the most fun I've ever had watching wrestling.

AEW darling Will Ospreay looked like a lock to surpass "Hangman" Adam Page and dethrone the terrorizer that was the then-champion Jon Moxley. Instead, AEW stuck to its roots and went the other way after Page and Ospreay put on an absolute classic and a Match of the Year contender. No one saw it coming, but in hindsight, it couldn't have worked out any better from every aspect.

Throw in this year's Anarchy In the Arena spectacular, and Double or Nothing outdid itself with levels of creativity and fun that don't seem beatable in modern wrestling. Somehow, some way, AEW continues to find ways to top itself, despite already setting the bar extremely high in Anarchy In the Arena's previous editions. That match was the definition of pro-wrestling, and it hit every note and then some.

Include phenomenal title defenses from Toni Storm, Kazuchika Okada and Mercedes Moné, plus the Ricochet vs. Mark Briscoe stretcher match, and Double or Nothing 2025 was literally too good. That isn't even mentioning the rest of the card, because there was more. It was too much good for one night. But what a night it was.

Tony Khan at Sportico Invest in Sports New York 2025 at Nasdaq HQ on November 04, 2025 in New York, New York. (Photo by Daniel Zuchnik/Sportico via Getty Images)

Booker of the Year: Tony Khan

Kel Dansby: TK is back on top of the wrestling world, partially by default, but also by correction. WWE and Triple H experienced a noticeable drop-off from their 2024 creative highs, while Shawn Michaels’ NXT became increasingly muddled by year-long TNA crossovers that never fully clicked. In that window, Khan recalibrated. Rather than overcomplicating things, he leaned back into what made AEW special in its early years: Clear stakes, focused arcs and letting talent drive the stories.

Not everything worked. I’ve been on record as an avid hater of the Jon Moxley/Death Riders storyline, but even that was eventually course-corrected with the return of Darby Allin and the resurgence of "Hangman" Page. More importantly, AEW found consistency elsewhere. The women’s division took a meaningful step forward, largely on the strength of “Ultimo” Mercedes Moné and "Timeless" Toni Storm, while the mid-card gained structure and identity through the Don Callis Family.

There are still gaps heading into 2026. The tag division hasn’t reclaimed its former “best in the world” status, and the women’s division needs deeper long-term storytelling — but progress matters. Khan steadied the ship, simplified the vision and put AEW back on an upward trajectory. That earns him Booker of the Year.