in the CW Division between ‘08-‘12? Lebedev in his prime Huck in his prime Afolabi Jones Haye Mormeck How would he have fared against those boys?
Briedis is an awkward fighter who is capable of beating most on any given night. I would favor him against all of those guys except Haye. Maybe Lebedev could be a tough one too seeing as he is a brawler.
Maybe 3 years ago I would agree but he’s declining and more than that I don’t rate his ring IQ, he can’t combine tools and strategies, he just picks a single, simple approach for each fight. Don’t get me wrong, he has all the tools to beat most of those guys but he fights stupid and doesn’t use them when he needs to. He scraped past Perez trying to rough him up instead of fighting at distance, bad tactics against the bigger man. He could have beaten Usyk in the WBS series but again he only concentrated on one strategy. He forgot to jab, clinch, move sideways His approach is too simple, at the very top you need to use all your tools, combine them, layer them, create abstractions. I have never seen him do this against a top level fighter
I think he would have done quite well. Jones and Haye being the most difficult fights for him. One guys from that era that I was quite high that doesn't get mentioned much is Giacobbe Fragomeni. He gave a prime David Haye all sort of hell beat some pretty strong European based guys. I think he would have giving him a good fight.
At his best he could beat all of them. I'd favour him against most of those and I'd have him no less than 50-50 against the others.
He KO's or UD's all of them, except for the trickiest one for him to deal with.... David Haye, who could possibly KO or UD him, but I'd still favor Mairis.
KO’s or UD’s all of them. Toughest fight - Lebedev Biggest challenge and the only possible loss - Haye. prime Huck would frustrate him even more than faded version did, another elbow shot quite possible, but still not a challenge.
