By Steve Kim

The last we saw of junior welterweight Ruslan Provodnikov he was dropping a close twelve round decision against Lucas Matthysse on the night of April 18th in Verona, New York. Now Banner Promotions is looking for his next fight.

Artie Pelullo, the head of Banner Promotions told BoxingScene.com on Monday afternoon:

"What we would like to do is have him back in October, November. Ruslan's coming to the States on the 4th of July to talk to me about his next fight. We're talking to Golden Boy about Humberto Soto, I spoke with Carl Moretti (of Top Rank) about Brandon Rios and the bottom line is we'd also like to get Tim Bradley and we'd even go up to '47. So that's what we're looking to do."

In an interesting development, Pelullo revealed that Provodnikov has no official ties to HBO.

"Ruslan Provodnikov is not contractually bound to any network," Pelullo stated. "He's a free agent because of the last fight where Showtime put a bid in and HBO matched it, which released us from our 'first and last' with HBO."

And 'first and last' is a situation where a network can make the first offer on a fight, then the promoter can go out and get competing bids and then gives the network the last chance to match whatever offers are on the table.

Pelullo makes it clear that his other clients, such as Demetrius Andrade and Petr Petrov, are free to perform on any platform.

"Absolutely, every one of our guys is a free agent. They can go to HBO, Showtime or the PBC. But the key is to make the fights for television that are fan-friendly and optimize the most amount of money for the fighters," said Pelullo.

When asked if he had talked to other entities regarding his fighters, Pelullo replied -"the answer is yes. I just don't think I should say anything more on that."

But he added - "Golden Boy has agreed to the Soto fight, they love the idea and like I said, we'd do Rios, Bradley. You know Ruslan, he'd fight anybody."

And it seems like on any network.

Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.