By Dan Ambrose: Michael Koncz, the personal adviser for Manny Pacquiao, is reporting that Pacquiao won’t be fighting on November 10th the date that his promoter Bob Arum had mentioned him fighting. Instead, Pacquiao will be fighting on December 1st against an opponent still to be determined.

However, the December 1st date coincides with the date that the 31-year-old Cotto plans on being back in the ring in New York at Madison Square Garden, so you have to figure that Cotto just be the guy that Pacquiao is looking to fight next.

Koncz said to RingTV “Bob Arum has moved the date now to Dec 1, and he’s done that at our request due to conflicting schedules with the boxing and Manny’s personal affairs. I met with Bob Arum in New York yesterday and had further discussions.”

New York, eh? That sounds like a lot like they could be looking to line up Cotto for nice pay per view fight that would have a good chance of bumping up Pacquiao’s sinking PPV numbers from his last fight. Cotto is coming off of a loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. last May that hauled in a whopping 1.5 million PPV buys. Depending what number is the legit PPV number – 700,000 or 900,000 – for Pacquiao’s last fight against Timothy Bradley, the 1.5 million buys for the Cotto-Mayweather fight brought in double Pacqiao’s numbers. That’s impressive, although it’s obviously not all Mayweather fans that purchased the fight card in high numbers. Cotto’s fans had a lot to do with that.

The Cotto-Pacquiao II fight makes a lot of sense right now because it gives Pacquiao and Arum a nice big payday, and it gives them an opportunity to show the differences between what Mayweather did against Cotto and what Pacquiao can do. If Pacquiao can beat Cotto more impressively than Mayweather did then it will be a feather in Pacquiao’s cap, and it could help make his potential fight against Mayweather Jr. that much bigger. Of course, Mayweather purposely slugged with Cotto instead of using movement and trying to outbox him. Mayweather Jr. likely could have made that fight much easier than he did if he chosen to box for 12 rounds instead of mixing it up.

Pacquiao could lose to Cotto at this point in his career, because Pacquiao seems to have lost a whole lot physically since beating Cotto in 2009, whereas Cotto is a little better now than he was then because he boxes more and slugs less.