Golovkin-Wade punch stats

By Boxing News - 04/24/2016 - Comments

golovkin823By Jeff Aranow: Dominic Wade (18-1, 12 KOs) was heavily routed last night in his 2nd round stoppage loss to IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (35-0, 32 KOs) on HBO.

This was supposed to have been the 25-year-old Wade’s moment in the sun, his 15 minutes of fame, but it turned out to be a disastrous night for the Al Haymon-managed fighter. Wade proved that he didn’t belong in the ring with Golovkin and shouldn’t have been put in the position to fight him in the first place by the IBF.

To no great surprise, Golovkin landed twice as many punches as Wade with many of those shots being very hard ones that quickly took the air out of him.

Golovkin connected on 54 of 133 shots for a connect percentage of 41%, according to CompuBox. Not bad. For his part, Wade landed 22 of 75 punches for a connect percentage of 29%. That’s not bad for someone who was beaten as soundly as Wade. But one reason that Wade was able to land 29 percent of his punches was because Golovkin appeared to be ignoring his own defense in order to pound Wade.

Golovkin sized Wade up early in the 1st round, and determined that his punches weren’t hard enough for him to worry. Golovkin was a much different fighter when facing the hard punchers David Lemieux and Curtis Stevens. Golovkin was careful with those guys that he didn’t get hit so often because they had the power to potentially hurt him if they landed with something big enough.

“It’s not special, I feel after first round it’s very close fight. It’s my play, it’s my game,” Golovkin said about him lowering his hands. “Of course, everybody come to just watch my fight.”

Golovkin needed to make it a drama show last night in front of the Forum crowd in Inglewood, California. The best way for Golovkin to impress the crowd was for him to lower his guard and focus on throwing big power shots. The fans didn’t even seem to mind that the fight ended so quickly because they got to see pure action and a lot of knockdowns.

Golovkin put Wade down three times in the fight. That was impressive. No one has done that to Wade before, and maybe no one will do it again depending on how his manager Haymon matches him from this point on.

Golovkin was stuck fighting Wade after he couldn’t get a fight against WBO middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders, and WBC champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez didn’t volunteer to face him. The World Boxing Council let Canelo take an interim fight against Amir Khan despite the fact that Canelo was supposed to have fought Golovkin next because he’d already been waiting for his title shot since last year.

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Golovkin stepped aside to let Canelo fight former WBC champion Miguel Cotto last November in the understanding he would get to fight the winner of that fight. Then the WBC let Canelo take an interim fight against Khan. Now it’s looking like neither Khan nor Canelo have any intentions of fighting Golovkin after their May 7 fight.

Wade, 25, gave it a good try last night, but he wilted quickly by the 2nd round, and he wasn’t able to hang with Golovkin’s power. It looked like Wade only had a Plan-A and that was to slug with Golovkin. We didn’t see much of any mobility from Wade, and he wasn’t moving his head very much either. He reminded me a lot of a middleweight version of Lamont Peterson, but without Peterson’s ability to throw body shots and throw combinations.

Everything that Wade threw was single shots, and there was no way that he was going to be able to defeat a hard puncher like Golovkin by throwing one punch at a time/ Wade needed to do something different in the ring that would keep him guessing, but instead, Wade’s game plan was pretty simple. He just tried to slug with him, and that plan failed miserably.

Golovkin probably would have taken it easy on Wade and let him hang around for a little longer if the crowd wasn’t cheering so loudly each time he landed something hard. This seemed to motivate Golovkin, who wasted no time in getting Wade out of there after knocking him down for the first time late in the 1st round. Golovkin dropped Wade twice in a speedy fashion in the 2nd round, and then the fight was stopped.