Rios vs. Chaves & Kovalev vs. Caparello this Saturday on HBO BAD

By Boxing News - 07/27/2014 - Comments

riosBy Dan Ambrose: Brandon Rios (31-2-1, 23 KOs) will be fighting for the first time in nine months when he gets in the ring in fight against the tough #10 IBF Diego Chaves (23-1, 19 KOs) in a 10 round bout at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Rios-Chaves fight is part of an HBO After Dark split site double-header. WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev (24-0-1, 22 KO’s) defends against #10 WBO Blake Caparello (19-0-1, 6 KOs) from the Revel Resort, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA.

Rios, 28, really needs a win badly in this fight if he wants to stay relevant in boxing. He’s fighting at welterweight now, and he doesn’t look like he has the talent to be fighting in this division. Rios’ trainer Robert Garcia blames his misfortunes, defeats to Manny Pacquiao and Mike Alvarado, in part due to him not training as hard as he used to.

Garcia now thinks that Rios is working hard and looking on par with how he was when he beat Anthony Peterson and Miguel Acosta. Those were two of Rios’ biggest wins of his career thus far, in addition to his victory over Mike Alvarado. Rios also has a win over Richard Abril, but he appeared to lose that fight by a lopsided decision but was still given a victory.

It’s unknown where Rios goes from here if he loses. That’ll be his third straight defeat, and you’ve have to figure it’ll be the end of him and Top Rank, because they might not want to keep him in their stable if he’s unable to win any longer.

Kovalev’s title defense against Caparello is far less appealing because it’s not seen as a competitive fight by anyone. With the Rios-Chaves fight, you have two guys that are evenly matched on paper and you have the added drama of Rios’ career being on the line, but with Kovalev-Caparello, it’s pretty much a straight up mismatch with Kovalev facing an easy to hit fringe contender without much power.

Caparello is unbeaten, but he’s so easy to hit and he’s got zero power to make this as a competitive fight. Unless Kovalev wears down from punching Caparello in the head all night and collapses from exhaustion, he’s going to knock this guy out.

It’s really a fight that HBO should have said no to before it became a solid, because it’s too much of a mismatch. Kovalev has the kind of power and talent to where he doesn’t need to drop down to the fringe contenders in order to take it easy. He can take on the best everytime and still easily win.

Caparello, a native of Australia, has wins over Aaron Pryor Jr, Elvir Muriqi, Allan Green, and Daniel MacKinnon. But he’s not faced anyone that is a good fighter yet, and that’s the whole problem.

Caparello is unproven and lacks the experience to face a guy like Kovalev. But in looking at some of Caparello’s fights, he’s clearly not talented enough to be competitive with Kovalev even if he did have the experience. But at least if he had fought someone good before, he’d have likely lost to them and then Kovalev wouldn’t need to bother with this fight. He could face better opposition.

WBA light welterweight champion Jessie Vargas defends his title against Anton Novikov, and light heavyweight contender Isaac Chilemba faces Cory Cummings.



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