By Eric Thomas: WBA World welterweight champion Paulie Malignaggi (32-4, 7 KO’s) seemed pretty upset at the post-fight press conference last night after having to struggle to defeat 23-year-old #10 WBA Pablo Cesar Cano (25-2-1, 19 KO’s) by a 12 round split decision at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, New York. Malignaggi insisted repeatedly that the fight wasn’t close, but he was impressed with Cano’s power. Malignaggi said “I haven’t been hit this hard since I fought Miguel Cotto.”

That was pretty much the end of the compliments from Malignaggi, because he spent most of the rest of the time talking about how he thought Cano didn’t even try to make weight after a certain period of time. Malignaggi said Cano and his people were just looking to get the win over him, and not worrying about winning the title. Cano came in over the limit by 1.4 pounds during the weigh-in. He attempted to take off the weight but still came in three quarts of a pound over the limit.

Malignaggi wasn’t done there; he also felt that one of the judges might have been influenced by the screaming from the crowd. Malignaggi felt that this was why one of them had Cano winning by the scores of 118-109.

Another beef Malignaggi had was with Compu-Box, the organization that keeps track of punches for Showtime. Compu-Box had Cano landing a lot of shots, including a lot of power shots. They had Cano overwhelmingly landing many more power shots compared to Malignaggi. This didn’t make Malignaggi happy, because he claimed that many of the shots that Cano was given credit for were punches that he felt he had blocked.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what Compu-Box’s numbers were because the judges scored it a close fight without any knowledge of what Compu-Box was doing. The fight just looked close and Malignaggi seemed to be too emotionally invested to see what pretty much everyone else had seen. There are few people who felt that Malignaggi won by an overwhelmingly easy decision, and there were a lot of fans who saw Cano winning.