What was the level of a prime Oleksandr Gvozdyk in Light Heavyweight division ?

I think prime Gvozdyk could have beaten David Benavidez

 

Gvozdyk at his best was very good. Beterbiev ruined him; I think without that bearded menace around Gvozdyk may have gotten even better.

 

It's hard to say, as he only really fought 2 good fighters at his best with results about as mixed as you can get. On the one hand, the Stevenson fight was a pretty flat performance in a fairly even fight which ended with as emphatic a knockout as you can get; and the Beterbiev fight was an admirable performance but ending in a catastrophic, retirement inducing loss. Then the circumstances of these fights make it even weirder. Stevenson was an old man, and that performance wasn't great.

Beterbiev is quite easy to look good against in a loss imo, guys like Yarde, Browne and Johnson all managed it, and the reason is quite simple. Beterbiev is always at the end of range and he's easy to touch. It's hard to hit him clean repeatedly and obviously just being able to hit him doesn't mean you're winning but it definitely can lead to showings which paint a fighter as better than they are.

In terms of ability, he's very good. He had a great counter left hook, a very good right hand to the body and he was very good at taking angles while punching. Good power, fast hands, good cardio and an evidently good but not perfect chin. All of this is well and good but the results make it hard to actually ascertain how good he was.

I think he's probably around the same level H2H as Dawson, Harding, Kates, the Davis brothers or Pastrano. Guys of that ilk.

 

We never saw his prime, he wasn’t the same after the Stevenson fight for obvious reasons, and he wasn’t particularly experienced before that.

I remember Gvozdyk saying something about him retiring after the Beterbiev fight because he had a pain in the back of his head after the fight, which he likely had in the past as well, as many get headaches after fights.

This shows the Stevenson fight may have made him very cautious when it comes to certain things, which likely also made him more gunshy.

 

Second or third best light heavyweight in the world by 2019.

 

Not sure, which is why I mentioned that he might be third behind Beterbiev (my no. 1) and Bivol, but I wouldn’t call anyone crazy for putting G above Bivol given how competitive he was against a prime Beterbiev.

A fight between G and Bivol could’ve answered this so it’s a shame how things went.