By Jim Dower: Naazim Richardson, the trainer for Shane Mosley, thinks that World Boxing Association light welterweight champion Amir Khan is a bigger puncher than Floyd Mayweather Jr. That’s kind of amusing because Khan doesn’t look like that big of a puncher and recently needed 11 rounds to take out Paulie Malignaggi last weekend at Madison Square Garden. In an article at Diamondboxing.com, Richardson said “Shane wasn’t in there with the kind of puncher that [Paulie] Malignaggi was just in there with. In a fight like that one there between Khan and Malignaggi, yeah, I would have probably stopped it.”
Richardson is defending his decision to let Mosley continue to allow his fight against Mayweather to go on even after it seemed bleak for Mosley and he was taking of a lot of punishment. But it’s interesting to see that Richardson thinks that the 23-year-old Khan is a bigger puncher than Mayweather. I saw both the Mayweather-Mosley and the Khan-Malignaggi fight, and I have to say that Mayweather was clearly the harder puncher compared to Khan.
I think Khan’s shots didn’t have nearly as much power and he didn’t land very many of the shots flush. Most of the time he would hit Malignaggi while he was moving backwards, which would take the power off the shot. Khan did look fast, I give him that, but he didn’t look incredibly powerful either. It might be that Richardson was more impressed with Khan’s power because of how the slender Malignaggi’s head would jolt backwards when he would get hit. Some of that seemed to me to because of Malignaggi’s skinny neck. I think Khan is a decent puncher, but not as strong a puncher as Mayweather. Mayweather dominated Mosley over 12 rounds, but failed to put him away. Mayweather wasn’t trying to knock Mosley out and seemed more like he was just interested in getting the win.
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