Guerrero: Danny Garcia doesn’t have KO power for 147

By Boxing News - 01/24/2016 - Comments

Image: Guerrero: Danny Garcia doesn't have KO power for 147By Tim Fletcher: Robert Guerrero (33-4-1, 18 KOs) wasn’t impressed with the punching power of Danny Garcia (32-0, 18 KOs) last night despite losing the fight to him by a 12 round unanimous decision in their battle for the vacant WBC welterweight title on Premier Boxing Champions on Fox.

Guerrero came away from the fight feeling he had done more than enough to deserve a decision. One thing that Guerrero noted about Garcia was his punching power, or lack thereof. While Guerrero believes that Garcia has decent power, he doesn’t see it as the knockout power that he had when he was fighting in the 140lb division.

Guerrero says WBA welterweight champion Keith Thurman has far better power than Garcia. Indeed, Guerrero says Thurman’s jab is better than Garcia’s right hand power. Fortunately for Garcia, most of his punching power comes from his left hook. Guerrero didn’t speak on that punch, but he did do a fairly good job of nullifying most of the left hands Garcia threw in the fight. Garcia was landing pretty much just right hands last night rather than left hooks.

“Man, I thought I won the fight. I’d love a rematch,” Guerrero said at the post-fight press conference. “I thought he was from Philly. They come to fight, right? They don’t run. They don’t hold. That’s what happened though. The fans loved it. They thought I won. I want a rematch. I want to do it again. I couldn’t really hear the scorecards because everybody was booing like crazy. I thought I had done what I needed to do to win the fight. I pushed it. I made Danny fight the last round, because all he wants to do was hold and run. He hit me with some combinations one after another. It didn’t faze me. It didn’t hurt me. They were asking me in the back ‘how was his power compared to [Keith] Thurman?’ I said Thurman’s jab is double his [Garcia] right hand. He does have some cracking power, but I don’t think he has the knockout power for 147,” Garcia said.

You have to believe Guerrero is telling the truth when he speaks about Garcia’s lack of power. Garcia didn’t look like one of the harder punchers in the welterweight division. If you compare the shots that Garcia was landing last night to some of the harder punchers in the division like Kell Brook, Keith Thurman and Errol Spence Jr, you would have to rate Garcia well below those fighters in power. Garcia also doesn’t look like he has a big frame for the division. Brook, Thurman and Spence all look like middleweights after they rehydrate for their fights in the welterweight division. Garcia looked like just a plain welterweight in size, and a small one at that. He doesn’t have a big frame for the division and his arms appear to be short compared to those fighters.

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If Garcia isn’t able to KO his opponents at welterweight like he’d been doing in the light welterweight division, then he could be in for a lot of problems in the 147lb division. To be sure, it wasn’t a good sign that Garcia struggled so badly to beat Guerrero. This should have been an easy fight for Garcia. Instead, it turned out to be one where he could have lost if Guerrero had taken the fight to him in the last half of the bout like Lamont Peterson did in his fight against Garcia last year.

The blueprint is out there in how to beat Garcia, and Guerrero showed in the first six rounds that the blueprint is still there. What Guerrero failed to do is put enough pressure on Garcia in the last half of the fight to get the win. He did a great job of pressuring Garcia in the first six rounds, but he moved away from that pressure in the second half of the contest. Guerrero can only blame himself and perhaps his trainer Ruben Guerrero for failing to do what they needed to do in order to get the win.



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