Ranking the Best Opponents for Deontay Wilder's Next Fight

Chris Arreola's best days were a few years back.

Nevertheless, to suggest he was the best fighter Deontay Wilder had met since earning a share of the heavyweight championship 18 months ago was hardly hyperbolic.

So given the ease with which the still-unbeaten champion dismissed his rugged foe Saturday night, neither is it hyperbolic to claim it was the Alabama hero's best performance.

"I'm one of the baddest, hardest-hitting heavyweights in the business," Wilder told Fox's Kristine Leahy after the fight, which ended when Arreola's corner surrendered after Round 8.

"I had to fight like a champion does. I don't play boxing."

It was the fourth successful title defense for the 30-year-old, who landed a hundred more blows (152 to 52), scored the fight's lone knockdown and gradually battered Arreola's face into a reddened, swollen mess.

Wilder claimed he broke his right hand and injured a muscle in his right arm, but he used both with great effect throughout the fight and also mixed in a ramrod left jab and occasional hooks to the body and head.

It was a left hook that wobbled Arreola badly at the end of the seventh. Another one-sided, three-minute follow-up in the eighth prompted the early concession from the challenger—and set the champion to naming the laundry list of fighters against whom he hopes to next risk his WBC crown.

"My goal is to unify the division," Wilder said. "Whoever has got those other belts, that's who I want."

Toward that end, the convincing win will ramp up the chatter surrounding his next fight, and we surveyed the landscape for the best prospective opponents before winnowing it down to a list of five.

They’re not all mandatory challengers or fellow champions, but they’d all provide compelling hurdles on Wilder's road to mainstream superstardom.

And as always, we invite you to click through and leave comments along the way.

5. David Haye

It wouldn't be their go-around.

Wilder and former WBA heavyweight champion David Haye have shared time in a ring together before. That was back when Haye was prepping for an ultimately scrubbed match with Tyson Fury and Wilder was still six wins and nearly two years away from beginning his own reign.

Footage of their sparring session has made the rounds on YouTube, and the level to which Haye appeared to control the exchanges makes the idea of them getting together with a belt on the line intriguing.

Haye has fought twice this year after spending more than three years on the shelf, and his chatter upon returning to the ring indicated he's serious about a match with his former training pal.

He's now ranked No. 6 by the WBC, which makes the prospect even more realistic.

"I think a great route would be to go to America and try to navigate a way to the WBC title," he told the Daily Mail. "Deontay Wilder is a very good champion and if I start fighting regularly I am probably a year or 18 months away from being in a mandatory position to fight him."

4. Alexander Povetkin

Associated Press

Remember the old days when title fights happened without the drama?

That's not been the case with Alexander Povetkin and Wilder.

The big men were scheduled to tangle for the WBC belt in Moscow in May, but the bout was scrapped a few weeks before when the Russian tested positive for meldonium. Wilder pressed on and ultimately signed the bout with Arreola, while Povetkin cried foul and insisted he'd done no wrong.

The World Anti-Doping Association backed him up earlier this month, saying that minor levels of meldonium would be allowed in tests through the start of October because meldonium was only added to the banned substance list at the beginning of this year. The amount of meldonium for which Povetkin was flagged falls within the allowable amounts—which means he'll sidestep suspension and remain Wilder's mandatory challenger in the eyes of the WBC.

Each team has sued the other, though, which does put the fight in some limbo.

"This is ultimately going to be decided in the U.S. courts in the southern district of New York where there are lawsuits pending," said Lou DiBella, Wilder's promoter, per BoxingNewsOnline.net. "So this is a legal matter. It’s nothing that the fighters are worried about right now.”

3. Luis Ortiz

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His silly "interim" belt is only third in the WBA's pecking order behind "unified" champion Tyson Fury and "world" champion Ruslan Chagaev, but no heavyweight has more juice these days than Cuban-born southpaw Luis Ortiz.

The 36-year-old stumbled at the end of 2014 with a failed drug test that followed a one-round erasure of Lateef Kayode, but he rebounded last year with three KOs in three fights over 11 total rounds.

His most recent wins came in six rounds against two-time Wladimir Klitschko challenger Tony Thompson in March. The triumph maintained Ortiz's claim to the aforementioned trinket and prompted post-fight discussion that included his name alongside the top names in the heaviest weight class.

“I will fight whoever next, whoever Golden Boy Promotions gives me I will take," Ortiz said, per BoxingNewsOnline.net. "Wilder, Fury, Klitschko anyone of them, I am ready to prove that I am the heavyweight world champion. A lot of people say a lot of things about me, but the testing showed that I am a clean fighter."

He was referred to a day later as "the heavyweight division’s new danger man" by BoxingNews24.com.

"Ortiz wears the serene mask of a cool assassin, almost like a giant version of Gennady Golovkin plying his trade," Paul Lam wrote. "This is a calculating and intelligent fighter at work, not some crude, uncoordinated slugger. Perhaps most importantly, Ortiz has the motivation required to reach the stratosphere of the sport."

2. Tyson Fury

DON EMMERT/Getty Images

Tyson Fury isn’t history's most accomplished heavyweight champion.

But a match between him and the WBC champ would be heaven for microphones.

The 27-year-old Englishman stands two inches taller (6'9" to 6'7") than Wilder, has stopped 18 of 25 professional foes and can match the chatty American word for word when it comes to pre-fight material or post-fight bravado.

The two champions went nose to nose in the ring after Wilder's January defeat of Artur Szpilka. But the vitriol goes back to when, after Wilder dethroned Bermane Stiverne, Fury went brash with the Mail Online.

"Back in the (Muhammad) Ali days, there was only one man doing the talking. The others wouldn't talk," he said. "This is different, though. We can both talk, we both play the press and we are both natural born entertainers. That's why it's the biggest fight out there as far as I'm concerned."

Wilder stoked the fire one month later, enticing Fury to challenge him before he went on to a successful match with four-belt champion Wladimir Klitschko.

“I want him really bad. I’m tired of all the talking," Wilder told ESNewsReporting.com (h/t Scott Gilfoid of Boxing News 24). "It’s been three years since we’ve been doing this. I’m at the point where I’m in a no-talk zone. I got what you want, so you know where to find me. So let’s make it happen."

1. Anthony Joshua

Associated Press

It's not Ali-Frazier by any stretch. 

But in terms of potential big events in the heavyweight ranks these days, it's as good as we have.

And the guys in corner offices on both sides of the pond are setting wheels in motion to see that Wilder and new IBF champ Anthony Joshua share something other than press release headlines.

Showtime signed the unbeaten Englishman to a deal that will make the cable giant his conduit to U.S.-based TV audiences, and Wilder was conveniently in studio in late June when the network carried Joshua's seventh-round TKO of American challenger Dominic Breazeale in his first title defense from London.

Wilder tweeted that it was time for Joshua to make his North American debut and said that instead of adhering to promoter Eddie Hearn's suggestion that the fight would happen sooner than later, they should do it now. After the fight, Joshua seemed just as anxious to get it done.

"One of the fights that I'm going to have, I will go there," he told Sky Sports.

"The person that springs to mind is Wilder."

Wilder, for his part, seemed plenty eager after dispatching Arreola.

"Of course I want the Furys and I want the Joshuas," he said. "The question is do they want me?"