Does Deontay Wilder keep his KO streak alive tonight?

By Boxing News - 03/15/2014 - Comments

wilder6(Photo credit: Tom Casino/Showtime) By Allan Fox: Unbeaten American heavyweight contender Deontay Wilder (30-0, 30 KO’s) will be looking to add his 31st consecutive knockout tonight in his WBC heavyweight eliminator bout against the once beaten Malik Scott (36-1-1, 13 KO’s) at the Coliseo Ruben Rodriguez, Bayamon, in Puerto Rico. Wilder, 28, has been able to stop his first 28 foes during his 6-year pro career, but he’s not faced anyone as good as Scott.

It’s been easy for Deontay up until now because of the match-making that Golden Boy Promotions had done for him. Against the guys that Deontay has faced, most of the top heavyweight contenders. But there’s no denying the huge one-punch power that Wilder has in his right hand, and we should see that tonight unless Scott is able to get to his chin before Wilder can get his own offense going.

Scott isn’t seen as a puncher, but he’s got respectable power and he’s not someone to be taken lightly. If he’s able to make contact with Wilder’s chin tonight, we could see him pull off a minor upset. It wouldn’t be a major upset because the jury is still out on Wilder in terms of how good he is. No one knows because his promoter hasn’t put him in with any dangerous opponents.

Wilder wants to keep his knockout string going for as long as possible due to the attention that he gets each time that he knocks someone out. However, it’s going to be getting tougher each time out for him to continue his streak, because there won’t be anymore easy marks for him. If Deontay can get past Scott tonight, he’ll be fighting either Chris Arreola or Bermane Stiverne this year for the WBC heavyweight title. Those guys are very difficult to knockout. Stiverne has never been stopped before, and Arreola has been halted only once and that was by the hard punching Vitali Klitschko. It took Vitali 10 rounds to stop Arreola in their fight four years ago. Arreola has improved a lot since then so it’s not going to be an easy job for Wilder to beat a fighter of his caliber.

If Wilder can get through this fight and the bout against the winner of the Arreola-Stiverne fight with his knockout string intact, he could be looking at some big fights in 2015, starting with IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko. He wants to fight for the WBC title in order to unify all the titles, and Wilder would be the perfect opponent for Wladimir to fight to get a lot of attention worldwide.



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