Deontay Wilder...top ten victories

People seem to by default have Stiverne as Wilders 2nd best victim after Ortiz when for me its clearly Breazeale. His only loss before fighting Wilder was to AJ and he went the distance with Wallin and those are his only 3 losses. 6 ft 7 superheavyweight with a 90% KO rate.

Ortiz1
Ortiz2
Breazeale
Washington
Stiverne I
Arreola
Liakovich
A Harrison
Duhaupus
Szpilka

A lot of these are tricky. I have Stiverne in 2014 as the third best opponent but I don't know how to treat Wilder scoring a shutout with no knockdowns. Liakovich was coming off to losses against good opponents how washed was he etc.

 

Is this Ring's top 10 rankings or the WBCs?

 

Not much debate that these are his 3 best wins IMO. After that, the rest are somewhat indistinguishable from 1 another IMO (including the rematch w/ Stiverne, who was inactive & overweight by that time). Perhaps a case could be made for Helenius @ #4, given that he was an ex-champ coming off a pair of high profile wins over Kownacki.

Wilder scored multiple KDs in the 1st Stiverne fight, which was considered roughly a pick 'em fight heading in iirc. I'd also argue that that may have been Wilder's most complete performance @ the world class level, given that he actually made some use of his boxing skills before regressing into his "bomb skwadz" persona.

 

Stirverne was a champion and was ranked the number 2 Heavyweight in the world he was clearly Wilder's 2nd best win and that's not even debatable.

 

Wow....... just...... wow.

 

i like wilder. he hit harder than any other boxer ever and found that shot more often than a unskilled guy ever would have. his resume is weak.

breazeale was awful.

 

I had thought Helenius held some kind of title during the Klit era - maybe not though.

I do remember Kellerman's desperate efforts to hype him up as some kind of opponent for Wlad, but nobody got too excited over it.

 

Helenius actually generated quite a lot of interest round her in 2011, at the height of his winning streak.

He was not ranked by Ring Magazine going into his fight with Wilder, but perhaps he should have been given his back to back wins against Kownacki?

 

For me its larger 1 loss guy who lost to AJ v smaller 1 loss guy who lost to sub .500 fighter.

If we're being generous Stiverne was an arbitrary pick to fight for a vacant belt who had a loss to a sub .500 fighter and whose win over Austin was a struggle. The Austin fight was one of only 3 fights he'd had scheduled longer than 8 rounds along with Manswell and Arreola. Breazeale had 7 such fights. And then Stiverne got to rematch Arreola who he'd clearly beaten for a world title. Guys like Stiverne get title shots all the time but they don't get to fight for vacant world titles against boderline top 10 guys they've already beaten and are likely to beat. And then he wins and gets on a pedestal as a world champion above other prospects who could have done the same thing if given that rare chance.

If you're referring to the Ring that was the end of the year when Stiverne had a belt. At the end of 2013 he had the WBCs silver belt. That seems like it was political. If Stiverne didn't have a belt on him(and I mean the Silver belt when I say belt here cause that got him into the top 5) where would he be ranked? Breazeale was ranked 9th in 2018, Arreola was ranked 9th before Stiverne and Arreola fought.

 

On a side note, that should have been Chisora's breakthrough.

He won the fight, and he should have been propelled up the rankings.

 

Still blows my mind, he never made the ring’s top ten.