Canelo Alvarez and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. will face off Saturday in a super-middleweight fight in Las Vegas.
They are the only two Mexican-born fighters to win a middleweight title (160-pound limit).
This fight will be at 164.5 pounds. Alvarez has never weighed in at over 155 pounds. Chavez, who struggled with making weight in previous fights, averaged 170 pounds at the time of the weigh-in for his past five bouts.
Absolute power
Expect both fighters to land a lot of big punches. Chavez ranks fourth and Alvarez ninth in power-punch connect percentage.
Don’t expect a jabfest between these fighters. According to CompuBox, 78.6 percent of their combined landed punches are power shots.
But you can also expect this one to build slowly. Chavez (40 punches) and Alvarez (40.9 punches) rank in the bottom 10 in total punches thrown per round, according to CompuBox.
Chavez enters the fight as the most accurate fighter in boxing, according to CompuBox. The only fighter other than Chavez who lands above 40 percent is current unified middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin.
Cinco de Canelo
This will be the fifth time since 2010 that Alvarez has fought on the weekend of May 5, and he has won the previous four fights. Chavez has never fought on that weekend.
The May 5 weekend has been popular for major boxing fights for some time. Floyd Mayweather Jr. helped increase the popularity of the weekend for boxing with his annual fights that weekend, most notably against Manny Pacquiao in 2015.
Alvarez has said that dates such as May 5 “belong to the Mexican fighters,” and this is the third straight year he is fighting around that week. In his last fight around this time, he christened the T-Mobile Center in Las Vegas in 2016 with a knockout win over Amir Khan.
Fighting families
The Alvarez and Chavez families boast multiple professional boxers.
Canelo and his three brothers have combined for 84 knockouts in their boxing careers. That total falls short of Julio Cesar Chavez (father of Chavez Jr.) and his 86 career knockouts.
Canelo’s brother (Ramon) and Julio Cesar’s brother (Omar) have fought each other twice. Ramon won the first meeting by decision and lost the second by knockout.