It was, without a doubt, my favorite rant any guest ever went on in the five-year history of the “HBO Boxing Podcast.” My co-host Kieran Mulvaney and I were on radio row at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for a pay-per-view, chatting with the one and only Roy Jones, and the topic of pound-for-pound lists came up.

Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez had recently been atop some people’s rankings, and Roy wasn’t having it:

“For them to put Chocolatito number one pound-for-pound? How?! He doesn’t have a full toolbox!”

Just like that, the two-word phrase that I now consider synonymous with Roy Jones was born.

“Pound-for-pound means your toolbox is full!” he continued. “I love Chocolatito, I love his style, he has the [Alexis] Arguello style down pat. But Arguello’s style is Arguello’s style. It’s not a full toolbox style. You understand where I’m coming from? You can’t be pound-for-pound unless you got a full toolbox! So quit just throwing people up there unless you see a full toolbox!”

Roy wasn’t finished. Having said a bit about a fighter who did not possess that full toolbox, he decided to balance it out by listing boxers who did:

“If you’re gonna judge pound-for-pound — Terence Crawford, full toolbox. Andre Ward, full toolbox. Vasiliy Lomachenko … toolbox with extra shit in it! Toolbox with additives!”

Back to Gonzalez, Jones said, “He only can fight one way. You can’t give him pound-for-pound.”

Jones’ dynamic diatribe came to mind this week as I reflected on Naoya Inoue’s off-the-deck, eighth-round KO of Ramon Cardenas that capped a busy boxing weekend on Sunday night. There’s a chance that thriller will be named fight of the year, and if it is, it will be the second time “The Monster” has won a fight that earned that distinction.

I’m not here to pronounce whether Inoue does or does not have a full toolbox or whether he is the current P4P king. But the full-toolbox conversation illuminates how boxers with certain styles tend to top P4P lists more often than boxers with certain other styles, and an offensive-minded, action-oriented, fight-of-the-year-producing knockout artist like Inoue climbing that list is a relative rarity.

There are 13 fighters who have sat atop The Ring magazine’s pound-for-pound list at some point between 2000 and 2025. Some were there briefly; some were there for years and years. Some were there by unanimous decree; some were highly debatable. But here are all 13 names, in alphabetical order:

Saul “Canelo” Alvarez

Terence Crawford

Gennady Golovkin

Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez

Bernard Hopkins

Naoya Inoue

Roy Jones

Vasiliy Lomachenko

Floyd Mayweather

Shane Mosley

Manny Pacquiao

Oleksandr Usyk

Andre Ward

Inoue is not the only exciting fighter on that list. He’s not the only one capable of being in the fight of the year.

But he is proving to be at the extreme end of that spectrum. Pound-for-pounders who double as true action fighters are something of a rarity, and Inoue just may be the most fan-friendly warrior to have topped the list so far this century.

Let’s cross off a few names to start. Hopkins, Lomachenko, Mayweather, Ward, Crawford, and Mr. Full Toolbox himself, Jones, all reached the heights they reached in large part by placing a premium on defense. They almost never made the decision to take a punch in order to give a punch. None of them were ever in the fight of the year, and several of them were never in anything even close to consideration for fight of the year.

Part of this was owed to the talent gap between these pound-for-pound kings and the great majority of their opponents. If you have that full toolbox, and you use all the supplies contained therein, you’ll often win without much drama (at least while in your P4P prime).

Jones was supposed to get pushed to his limit by James Toney, ditto Mayweather against Pacquiao, Crawford against Errol Spence, and Hopkins against Felix Trinidad. Limits were not pushed in any of those fights.

There are always exceptions, and yes, good, close fights can be found on some of their BoxRec line-by-lines (Lomachenko vs. Devin Haney and Teofimo Lopez, Ward vs. Sergey Kovalev, for example). But they never approached the fight of the year level. These were/are sublimely skilled boxers who, at their best, couldn’t be dragged into a war.

Alvarez, Mosley, and Usyk all had/have more fan-friendly styles (Canelo’s post-prime recent run notwithstanding) and, despite probably qualifying for full-toolbox status (there may be some question there with Mosley), also made fan-friendly fights that could conceivably top fight of the year lists.

Some considered Alvarez-Golovkin II the best fight of 2018. The same goes for Usyk-Tyson Fury I in 2024. And Mosley’s first fight with Oscar De La Hoya was every bit as good as Usyk-Fury I and Alvarez-Golovkin II but had the misfortune of competing for fight of the year against Erik Morales-Marco Antonio Barrera I and Trinidad-Fernando Vargas.

In any case, Alvarez, Mosley, and Usyk could each be fairly described as boxer-punchers, as gladiators willing to take a hard shot here and there but not routinely eschewing defense just to please the fans.

That leaves four names in contention for the title of most thrilling pound-for-pound king of the 2000s. They’re the four men whose toolboxes Roy Jones would likely stop to inspect: Golovkin, Gonzalez (we know what Jones thought of his tool supply), Pacquiao, and Inoue.

I’m going to take liberties with the parameters of the discussion and cross “GGG” off the list because I never had him ranked No. 1 pound-for-pound. Was he top three for a few years? Absolutely. But I didn’t agree with The Ring briefly ranking him at the top, and to me it’s fairly arbitrary to include Golovkin in this discussion but not include Trinidad, Juan Manuel Marquez, or Kovalev, all of whom rose to No. 2 on The Ring’s list and may have been somebody’s No. 1 at some point.

To me, Inoue is part of a three-man debate with Pacquiao and Gonzalez for the fighter this century who has best combined pound-for-pound skills with mano-a-mano thrills.

And my intent here is not to crown a champion. Rather, it is to marvel at how rare it is for a fighter who gets knocked down (as Inoue now has in two of his last four fights) and who will stand and slug it out to get his business done against an opponent he knows can hurt him (as Inoue did repeatedly over the next six rounds after Cardenas floored him) to also be a P4P king.

When it came to 1990s pound-for-pound rivals Julio Cesar Chavez and Pernell Whitaker, there was no question who was the bigger gate attraction. But, once they’d spent 12 rounds in a ring together, there was also no question who was superior in a pound-for-pound sense (ridiculous judging aside, of course).

And maybe if Inoue moved all the way up in weight to find his personal Whitaker in Shakur Stevenson, he too would be knocked off his pound-for-pound perch.

But at this moment, Inoue is offering that rarest of combinations. He’s proving to be missing a tool or two — specifically, he must have loaned out the tool that one uses not to get caught with flush left hooks — but is spectacular enough with the tools he has to be in the pound-for-pound conversation anyway.

He’s 32 years old now and has been fighting professionally for 13 years, and as crowd-pleasing as the Cardenas war was, it also may have suggested that Inoue’s time at the very top is winding down.

The fact is, being in fight-of-the-year-worthy brawls and being pound-for-pound tends to be an unsustainable combination. They’re not quite mutually exclusive, clearly. But usually, it’s the pure boxers, those who practice some self-preservation, who are No. 1 on our pound-for-pound lists, and it’s the blood-and-guts warriors who are No. 1 in our hearts.

Inoue is in contention for No. 1 in both spots.

I don’t know if he has a full toolbox. But he sure is delivering the full fight fan experience.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.