Former world champion Paulie Malignaggi has been doing a lot of sparring with Conor McGregor lately in Las Vegas. After the crazy world press tour, it’s now all about doing work in the gym.
Malignaggi admits the talk about the Irishman’s power is not all talk. He can sting you.
“Do you want to know if he hits hard? Yeah, I mean, he’s not a weak puncher. I’ll say that. People are dying for me to say, ‘Oh he hits hard!’ Oh, his big left hand.’ Listen, if Conor hits you, you’re going to feel it,” said Malignaggi on the Big Brown Breakdown podcast.
He then went on saying that McGregor is definitely more powerful than your average puncher but does not possess ‘oh my God power’.
“Is it ‘Oh my God power’? No, ‘Oh my God power’ is very rare. I’ve sparred thousands of rounds in my life, I’ve sparred hundreds of people in my life… the amount people that I sparred that had ‘Oh my God power is probably only a handful,” he said.
In another interview with ESPN, a black eyed Malignaggi told that McGregor does have a game plan and his own style.
“He’s going to have his own style and set of things he does. He’s got a game plan. It’s not what people think. I’ll put it like this: He knows what he wants to do and he has a method of how he wants to get there. The mechanism of how he gets there may look, to the naked eye, ‘hmm, I don’t know about this.’ But there’s a method to his madness. He’s a thinker,” revealed the former welterweight world champion.
Malignaggi didn’t make a concrete prediction but believed that there will be ‘moments’ for McGregor to capitalise.
“This is a fight of moments, and I think he can give himself certain moments. If those moments turn into bigger moments, that’s not up to me. That’s up to Conor McGregor.”