By Jason Kim: Last night previously unbeaten middleweight contender David Lemieux (25-1, 24 KO’s) saw his future title shot hopes dashed in a 7th round TKO loss to #3 ranked WBC contender Marco Antonio Rubio (50-5-1, 43 KO’s) at the Bell Centre, in Montreal, Canada. Lemieux, who came out fast looking to knock Rubio out early like Lemieux had with the vast majority of his over-matched opponents, was knocked down in the 6th and then stopped in the 7th as he took punishment from Rubio.

The question now is whether Lemieux can learn from this loss and come back to find the same kind of success he was having before this bout. There’s a couple of things that make me think that Lemieux might not get any better than he is now. One of them being his chin. He really wasn’t hit that much by Rubio in the fight but the shots that he did get hit with seemed to worry Lemieux and hurt him. He had his nose bloodied in the 1st round, and was hurt by a looping right hand from Rubio in the 6th.

To be sure, Rubio can punch and has excellent power. However, there are a lot of other fighters in the division that punch as hard as Rubio. If Lemieux can’t take getting hit more than handful of times before getting hurt, he’s going to have problems. Each of his fights would then be literally a race against time where he would have to try and knock out his opponent before he gets knocked out. I don’t know how much success Lemieux will have by fighting all out like this in order to protect his weak chin.

Another factor that is going to hurt him is his tendency to fight so hard trying to score a knockout. He’s going to have problems against fighters that can box and are looking to take him past the 6th round like Rubio did. Rubio showed that it’s not that hard to avoid Lemieux’s big shots by backing away, keeping your guard high and leaning back when he throws his big shots to take away the steam from them. Lemieux has to start working the body more and head hunting a lot less. He needs to throw more jabs and relax more. He was tensing up from the 1st round on, as if he had to get the knockout.

As the rounds went on, Lemieux should have sensed that the knockout wasn’t going to happen and focus more on just boxing. But instead he stayed committed to trying to knock Rubio out and paid for it by getting knocked out himself. Lemieux is only 22, but I’m not sure that he’ll ever be the fighter that can dominate at middleweight. He’ll do well when being put in with scrubs and fighters with weak chins. But you put him in with a guy like Rubio, Sergio Martinez, Gennady Golovkin, Dmitriy Pirog, Felix Sturm or Fernando Guerrero, to name just a small number, and Lemieux will likely struggle and get knocked out. He seems to be more of a fighter that will live and die by the knockout.