By Keith Idec

Dejan Zlaticanin doesn’t think Mikey Garcia should spend time discussing future fights when a very difficult fight awaits Garcia on Saturday night.

Montenegro’s Zlaticanin sounded offended during a recent conference call when he was asked about Garcia assessing hypothetical fights against lightweight champions Jorge Linares (WBA) and Terry Flanagan (WBO), and WBC/WBO super lightweight champion Terence Crawford. Garcia (35-0, 29 KOs) has discussed each of those potential bouts with reporters since his fight against Zlaticanin (22-0, 15 KOs) has been announced, but only because he was asked questions about those fights.

That didn’t seem to matter to Zlaticanin, who’ll make the first defense of his WBC world lightweight title against Garcia on Saturday night at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas (Showtime; 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT).

“I don’t know if that’s respect or disrespect,” Zlaticanin said through a translator during the conference call. “I want to get in the ring and to show everything, but that’s not good for him if he talks like that because it will break [his concentration]. He can’t think about it. He needs to win this fight first, then to talk about that. Boxing is real life. This is not movies.”

The 29-year-old Garcia heaped praise upon Zlaticanin throughout the same conference call. The former two-division champion made it clear, too, that he is in no way overlooking the powerful southpaw, who’s listed as a ?-? underdog against Garcia.

“I definitely do have to get through this fight first and this is the main focus,” Garcia said. “But whenever I get asked about a future fight, I have to answer and have to reply with some logic. And if everything goes well in this fight against Dejan, of course we’re gonna move forward and look at what’s available. And if we can unify titles or defend the title against a well-known name, or maybe move up in weight class, things like that, you have to start, you know, planning the future.

“But the fight that’s most important is what’s in front of me, which is Dejan Zlaticanin, and I don’t think there’s any problem with that. It’s not gonna affect the way I perform. It’s not gonna affect the way I train for this fight. My main focus is January 28th, and then after that we’ll move on to whatever the future has for us.”

Zlaticanin-Garcia will open Showtime’s doubleheader Saturday night. Northern Ireland’s Carl Frampton (23-0, 14 KOs), the WBA world featherweight champion, and former champion Leo Santa Cruz (32-1-1, 18 KOs), of Rosemead, California, are set to square off in the main event, a rematch of the July 30 fight in Brooklyn that Frampton won by majority decision.

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.