Were you impressed by Khamzat Chimaev performance?

[krelianx]

I question his fight IQ. He comes out too aggressively and burns himself out. He has gotten into two very close fights that he should have handily won. If he paced himself better he would not look like a murderer for 5 minutes and then gas. It's risky, and against someone with great cardio and output it might be an issue, like Whitaker.

His skills are undeniable, but he doesn't fight safe.

 

[TheMMAnalyst]

First round, very impressed. I knew if Khamzat gets Usman to the mat without them scrambling back up straight away, he’d have a huge advantage. Well, Khamzat did get fresh Usman down and made it look kinda easy. That alone should impress the hell out of anyone. Then Chimaev proceeded to dominate Usman for the remainder of the round, threatening with chokes and landing gnp, even if the strikes were kinda soft or blocked. Credit to Usman for defending well, he was put in baaad positions.

2nd round I don’t know what I was watching. They had the pace of a 3rd round HW fight, both careful in their advances and pretty much just pot shotted. It wasn’t impressive for either guy and Usman got back in the fight by landing the better shots on the feet, where he managed to keep the fight. I’d say they didn’t look like top5 MW fighters here.

3rd round was pretty close, Usman having some advantage on the feet and Khamzat got the takedown which probably won him the round. Usman managed to get up and the stand up was sloppy as shit by both guys, swinging wide arcing shots, telegraphed and bad technique. Arms totally burned out from grappling? Maybe, but that after taking the second round off that looked awful. At least for Usman it was a short notice fight, so I will cut him a little slack.

I don’t know how Costa would’ve looked against this version of Chimaev, but ehh.. Overall not very impressed. I think Costa would’ve beat this version of Usman and I’ll fight you


Btw @TheMMAnalyst wasn’t this fight pretty much how we thought it would to down?

Very fitting analysis @Spath - to me both guys managed to impress, yet disappoint.

Khamzat clearly has insane wrestling and grappling to be able to do that to Usman (take down multiple times, control at length, threaten subs, etc.), but he has a highly suspect gas-tank. It's tough to take away too much though, if he did truly break his right wrist on the RNC slam escape that would explain why he was so low volume and not confident. But his defense is still terrible and when he can't just physically overwhelm guys he runs out of ideas very quickly.

Usman showed that even on short-notice he has insane endurance and ability to persevere and adapt, which is something he didn't have to do much in his title run/reign (was usually the guy controlling the pace and range), however he definitely seems to have heavily degraded in wrestling (defense is worse and his offense is non-existent; would reach for the low-single and we all knew his knees are trash and was never going to attempt it) and took a while to get confident to work behind his jab.

Short notice fights are always a cluster-fuck though - preparing for a different opponent is such a huge curveball that fighters without super-deep skillsets are forced to use more basic tools to simplify their approach. I don't want to take too much away from it but I will say that overall I was more impressed with Usman than Khamzat.

Chimaev had pretty much every advantage (home field, smaller and unprepared opponent, younger, etc.) and had to scrape a majority draw by the skin of his teeth. I wouldn't be shocked if they put him in a title fight just because it feels like Cannonier could easily derail him and why risk that after they've invested so much in him?

Definitely don't see him being a dominant champ with this type of performance though - he is just so one-dimensional in his different phases of the game; spams takedowns until he gasses, looks to throw 1-2's with occasional body kick or straight right if at range, and if that fails he'll just recklessly brawl (all with little to no head movement or control of range or defensive layers).

It is Middleweight though, so maybe that is a championship level skill set in the current state of things lol...

 

[Spath]

It is Middleweight though, so maybe that is a championship level skill set in the current state of things lol...

Thanks again and on to the next one! I don’t need to ask for your thoughts on Black Beast vs Almeida… Haha