Canelo Alvarez and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. will face off Saturday in a 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 last five bouts.
Absolute power
Expect both fighters to land a lot of big punches. Chavez ranks fourth and Alvarez ranks ninth in power-punch connect percentage.
Don?t expect a jab-fest between these fighters. According to CompuBox, 78.6 percent of their combined landed punches are power shots. ESPN Stats & Information
But you can also expect this one to build slowly. Chavez (40 punches) and Alvarez (40.9 punches) both 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?s 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
Both the Alvarez and Chavez families have multiple professional boxers in the family.
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.
