Cotto’s options for June 18 are poor

By Boxing News - 02/28/2016 - Comments

Image: Cotto’s options for June 18 are poorBy Dan Ambrose: 35-year-old Miguel Cotto (40-5, 33 KOs) plans on fighting one June 18 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Juan Manuel Marquez, 42, was the guy that was in the lead position to get that fight, but he’s not going to be available for that date because he wants to take a tune-up fight in the summer. Marquez has been out of action for two years due to a knee problem.

That leaves Diego Chaves and Ruslan Provodnikov as two of the possibilities for Cotto. Those are not good options for obvious reasons. Provodnikov is a light welterweight, who has lost two out of his last four fights. He was beaten especially bad by Lucas Matthysse last year in April, and it was really hard to watch that fight.

Chaves, 29, is no better. He hasn’t won a fight since 2014, and his record in his last four fights is 1-2-1. It’s going to look like Cotto is really scraping the bottom of the barrel if he chooses Chaves, but then again, Cotto has taken a number of soft jobs in recent years. He fought Daniel Geale last year in June 2015 after he was knocked out in three rounds by WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin in 2014. Cotto also fought Delvin Rodriguez in 2013 in a 3rd round stoppage win.

Rodriguez was little more than an ESPN level Friday Night Fight type of fighter in my view, and not a major player. It was a mismatch and terrible one at that. Given that Cotto is coming off of a 12 round decision loss to Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last November, I wouldn’t be surprised if this loss is used for justification for Cotto to take a confidence booster type of fight. In other words, Cotto could be taking a soft job as a showcase fight in order to build his confidence up.

I don’t know why Cotto would need to waste time on confidence booster type of opposition, because he did alright against Canelo and didn’t get wiped out by him. Cotto was just out-sized by the light heavyweight sized Canelo. It would have been a winnable fight for Cotto if he weighed in the 170s and wasn’t giving away so much weight to Canelo in that fight.

If Cotto does fight Chaves or Provodnikov, then he’s going to need to make a big decision whether to stage the fight on regular HBO or pay per view. If he insists on televising it on PPV, then he needs to be ready for very low PPV numbers, because I don’t think the boxing world is ready to pay to see Cotto beat up on smaller mediocre fighters like Provodnikov or Chaves.

If Cotto is willing to fight on regular HBO, then fighting struggling fighters like Chaves or Provodnikov are decent options. I still don’t think those would be worthy opponents for headliner type fights, but they would be decent opponents if Cotto were to be fighting in a co-feature bout. But if he’s going to fight Chaves or Provodnikov on PPV, then this is going to be really interesting to see who will be willing to pay to see that. I think it’s like the tired old fight that Top Rank is peddling for April 9 between Manny Pacquiao and Tim Bradley. Who is going to pay for that? It’s just a wacky decision to have that fight on PPV after all this time.



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