‘Dancing with the Stars 23’ finale rankings: Will James Hinchcliffe or Laurie Hernandez win?
“Dancing with the Stars” fans, the end is almost here — though we figure that for many out there, that’s not a celebration so much as it is a bummer since it means that, most likely, we are now stuck waiting until March to see precisely what’s going to be coming up on the show next.
Still, we’ve got a job to do this morning, and that is to rank the remaining for Stars and their pros in terms of their odds of winning — which includes getting the best scores and the strongest overall viewer vote. We do gotta be honest here — we wouldn’t be shocked if the show just handed everyone remaining the same scores at the end of Monday’s show and left it up to the people watching at home to decide.
4. Jana Kramer and Gleb Savchenko (last week: 4) – Kudos to Jana for making it this far, which is significantly further than we ever thought she would make it this season (and that is meant as no slight. What she’s done that is so remarkable primarily is that she’s been able to improve more and more as time went on; while some other Stars may have peaked too soon, the one thing that she does have going into the finale is a little bit of momentum.
3. Calvin Johnson and Lindsay Arnold (2) – As a viewer, we love Calvin and we’d be thrilled to see him win. In looking at this objectively, he may be facing a little bit of an uphill battle. The biggest issue that he is probably facing moving forward is merely one of being able to match the top two dancers in scores. He has more fun than almost anyone out there, but he’s probably not as complete a dancer as either Laurie or James.
2. James Hinchcliffe and Sharna Burgess (3) – We’ve really spent a good deal of time over the past few days really studying hard precisely what people are saying about this season in the polls, and from much of that we’ve really gotten the sense that James has a real shot of winning this. We do still think that Laurie has the inside edge just because her ability is so out-of-this-world, but given his growth and his personality, the IndyCar driver would definitely be a worthy winner this season.
1. Laurie Hernandez and Val Chmerkovskiy (1) – We’ve ranked her #1 since the start of the season, so we’d be an idiot to suddenly reverse course from that now. What she brings is the total package: A strong dancer who can channel her inner emotions, a celebrity with a huge following, and also a performer with an extremely popular pro as a partner.
Now, let’s turn this over to you one final time: Vote for your favorite of the remaining stars below! You can also head over here to see what everyone will be performing on Monday night’s episode. (Photo: ABC.)