Start with the number everyone will quote: Horiguchi's 61% takedown defence. Demetrious Johnson landed 14 of the 19 takedowns he has conceded in the UFC, in the 2015 title fight. The other ten UFC opponents went 5 of 27, all in Round 1. Johnson is not an outlier to be thrown away, though. He is the only opponent who attacked Horiguchi at Almabayev-like volume (13.2 attempts per fifteen against Almabayev's 10.35), and he got in 64% of the time. The counterweights: it was 2015, Horiguchi was 24, Johnson is the best flyweight in history, and Almabayev's volume against top-8 opposition drops to 6.8 per fifteen. The model puts Almabayev much closer to the field than to Johnson, which is the single largest reason Horiguchi is the pick.
Almabayev's wrestling has a tier split of its own, and the line is sharp. Kape was #6, Nicolau #7 and Perez #7 when he fought them. Against those three he is 2-1 with 3 of 17 takedowns, 17% control and an out-landed 117-98. That is despite Nicolau arriving off two straight losses and Perez off a 17-month layoff. Against everyone else he is 5-0 with 30 of 55 and 67% control, and that group includes #14 Charles Johnson (6 of 9, 8:48 of control). So the wall is the top eight, not the rankings as a whole, and Horiguchi is #5. He won two of the three top-8 fights anyway, on a third-round knockdown and ride against Nicolau and a counter-guillotine on a Perez shot. That is a real skill: he is dangerous even when the plan fails. But it is not the skill his rate line advertises. Meanwhile his striking differential has fallen to −0.3 per fight over his last three, while Horiguchi's second run sits at +36.0.
The Kape bridge completes the picture, though it is thinner than the fight totals suggest. Kape beat both men in Round 3 of a five-round main event. After two rounds Horiguchi led 19-7 with 2 of 5 takedowns and 4:00 of control; Almabayev trailed 32-33, 0 for 6 on takedowns, with no control. Both were then out-landed heavily in Round 3 (8-12 and 8-28). The gap between them was the wrestling, not the striking. There are two caveats. Almabayev's loss was materially affected by an eye poke the referee missed. And the Kape fight also showed Horiguchi's durability problem. He has no KO/TKO win since December 2020, and three of his four documented knockdown-or-KO events (Pettis 2021, a Hokamura knockdown in 2022, Kape 2026) came in his last 12 bouts. But Almabayev is the least equipped opponent of his recent run to exploit that, with one knockdown in eight UFC fights, no UFC knockout wins and 2.28 significant strikes per minute. The risk shows up as cumulative time on his back, not as a one-punch branch.