No longer willing to “bully” Nate Diaz, Kevin Lee targets two other top lightweights

By Tom Taylor - February 20, 2018

When fan favorite lightweight contender Nate Diaz announced his intention to return to the cage, recent interim lightweight title challenger Kevin Lee was among the first fighters to call him out. When this callout went unanswered, however, Lee formed the opinion that Diaz doesn’t actually want to fight.

Kevin Lee

“I don’t know how folks jumped on the Nate bandwagon so hard, folks just think he is such a fighter, but the man doesn’t want to fight, that’s the bottom line,” Lee said on a recent episode of Cage Side Submissions (h/t Nicole Bosco of FanSided). “If a man doesn’t want to fight, I’m not a bully. I’m not going to keep berating him and going at him. He is in and out of Vegas all the time, I see him in the store here a lot, me and him we will get into a little conversation here and there, but I’m not going to berate a man that doesn’t want to fight. If he doesn’t want to fight ok, we won’t worry about it. He doesn’t want to fight, if he does he damn sure ain’t going to fight someone like me, he’s going to fight somebody like Eddie [Alvarez] who is on his way out.”

With a possible bout with Nate Diaz seemingly off the table, Lee now has his crosshairs on two other top lightweights.

“Right now I’m looking at [Edson] Barboza, I think Barboza is a great fight, a really good matchup for me,” Lee said. “He fought a lot of the guys who are at the top and I’m gonna whoop his ass harder than Khabib [Nurmagomedov] did. I’m also looking at somebody like Eddie Alvarez who is up there without a fight, he’s sitting on the sidelines, he’s trying to avoid me as much as he can. There’s a couple of fights that I’m looking at, that I’m interested in. They are not all necessarily above me, obviously, that were you want to look but really those rankings don’t mean shit, and they don’t mean shit to me.”Who do you want to see Kevin Lee fight next?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 2/20/2018.


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Kevin Lee