WBC heavyweight champion Deontay “Bronze Bomber” Wilder (35-0, 34 KOs) is promising to knockout Polish challenger Artur Szpilka (20-1, 15 KOs) this Saturday night in their contest on Showtime from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Deontay does not care that Szpilka has improved since his knockout loss to Bryant Jennings in 2014. Deontay doesn’t believe that Szpilka can improve enough to beat him on Saturday. Szpilka looked really bad in his fights against Jennings and Mike Mollo. However, Szpilka will be entering the ring on Saturday night with a 4-fight winning streak, albeit with wins over much lesser fighters than Wilder.
“Saturday, we’re going to see if he’s different or better,” Wilder said to Fightnews about Szpilka. “He’s facing one of the most dangerous guys in the division; one of the hardest hitting guys in the division, with the biggest knockout ratio. I’ve got a 97 percent knockout ratio. I don’t play around when I get inside the ring. 2016, undisputed champion of the world,” Wilder said.
Szpilka will need a couple of things working for him on Saturday to get the victory over Deontay. A.) a strong chin. B.) aggressiveness.
Deontay has the advantage in power, hand speed, size, experience, mobility and overall athleticism. Those are a lot of things that the 26-year-old Szpilka will need to overcome in this fight for him to have a chance of winning. Szpilka has a southpaw stance and good punching power that could help him in this fight. Szpilka looked good in beating Tomasz Adamek, Ty Cobb, Manuel Quezada and Yasmany Consuegra. Those guys are not in the same league as Deontay though. Beating them doesn’t mean that Szpilka is going to beat Deontay. It just means that Szpilka is capable of beating B and C level heavyweights at this point in his career.
Szpilka’s trainer Ronnie Shields says they’ve scouted out Deontay’s fights and they see a flaw in his game that they believe they can exploit. One of the things that they may have noticed was how Deontay likes to back straight up when he’s attacked. If his training team hasn’t fixed this problem by Saturday night, then you can expect Szpilka to take advantage of it by going after Wilder to try and KO him as quickly as possible. It’s going to need to be a fast knockout for Szpilka, because the longer the fight goes the more changes Deontay will have to score a knockout.