By Scott Gilfoid: WBO middleweight champion Andy Lee (34-2, 24 KOs) will be facing arguably the biggest test of his career this Saturday night against the talented Peter Quillin (31-0, 22 KOs) in a non-title fight at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Quillin has to be seen as the favorite in this fight due to him having the better speed, power, and chin and boxing skills. However, Lee sees himself as being evenly matched against Quillin and he thinks it’s a tossup fight. I wish I could agree with Lee, but I can’t. I think Quillin is going to do a royal number on Lee unless he’s weight drained from his efforts to try and make weight on Friday.

Quillin came in a tad bit over the 160 pound limit with him weighing 161.4. Quillin put in a game effort to lose the remaining weight, but he wound up six ounces short of his goal. As such, Quillin won’t have a chance of winning the WBO title. He was hoping to get a chance of recapturing his old WBO title, but it’s not going to happen. But never the less, Quillin wants to whip Lee and add his scalp to his long resume of scalps. Having Lee’s name on his resume will be a fine addition, and it’ll go well with names like Lukas Konecny, Gabriel Rosado, Fernando Guerrero and Hassan N’Dam.

“We are evenly matched,” Lee said via Fight News. “There’s not much between us physically. And our records are similar too. It will be close.”

Overall, boxing fans are picking Quillin to win this fight on Saturday. If Lee wins the fight, it’s going to be an upset, and I think that’s not something that is likely to happen. If Lee does pull off an upset, he’s going to need to come out fast and go right hand happy. The important thing is that Lee is going to need to do this before Quillin gets his offense going because if he gets his own power shots going, I see Lee folding up quickly under the fire power from Quillin’s hard shots.

I think it’s a mistake on Lee’s part to come into the fight thinking he’s evenly matched with Quillin, because Lee’s history just doesn’t show this, especially with the way that Lee needed to rally to defeat John Jackson and Matt Korobov. It’s not a good sign that Lee needed to rally to beat the likes of Jackson and Korobov, because those are guys that Quillin likely would have made easy work of had he been matched against those guys.

Lee looked horrible last December in the Korobov fight, and he was clearly trailing in the 6th round. Korobov got a little sloppy with his offense in the 6th, and this enabled Lee to hurt him with a homerun right hook that he threw. Had Korobov fought in a careful manner like he’d done in the first five rounds, he would have likely cruised to an easy lopsided 12 round unanimous decision.