By Dan Ambrose: It’s pretty clear what unbeaten junior middleweight contender Erislandy Lara (15-0-1, 10 KO’s) will be attempting to do tonight against Paul Williams (39-2, 27 KO’s) in their scheduled 12 round non title fight at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Lara, 28, is going to be trying to hit Williams as hard as he can with left hands to try and test Williams’ chin and see if he can get him out of there as fast as possible. Williams was knocked cold in his last fight against Sergio Martinez in November. That’s not a lot of time to go by since that brutal knockout, and it’s probably a really bad idea that Williams’ management are putting him in with a fighter as good as Lara.

It doesn’t matter that Lara looked horrible in his last fight against Carlos Molina in March. Lara can still punch and if Williams’ chin has been compromised because of his knockout loss to Martinez, Lara will have more than enough power to get Williams out of there in a real hurry.

There really isn’t much choice for Williams, though, because he’s saying he only wants to fight three more times, including this bout, and because of that he’s got to get the best opponents he can to make as much money as he can before retiring. That means if he gets knocked out over and over again, he’s likely going to keep fighting the best guy he can get.

Lara isn’t the type of fighter you want to be facing coming off of a brutal knockout loss like the one Williams suffered against Martinez. As such, Williams is taking a big gamble that could end up hurting him in the end. Williams trainer has supposedly changed Williams’ style of fighting to keep him from getting hit so much but that’s going to be hard to accomplish, because Williams doesn’t use his reach to his advantage.

His jab is a pawing one thrown without much power and it’s doubtful he’ll have improved it much. And Williams tends to fight in a straight up matter where he crowds his opponents and tries to beat them by throwing a massive amount of punches. If you tinker with that and have him throwing pawing jabs from the outside, Lara will just walk right through those shots to get in close and force Williams to fight in his old style.

Williams will have no other choice but to go back to what brought him thus far, because he doesn’t move well and won’t have a good enough jab to keep Lara stuck on the outside. It comes down to whether Williams’ chin will hold up under the big shots that Lara will be hitting him with. If Williams can take Lara’s best shots, then I see Williams winning by a 12 round decision. If not, then we’ll see Williams getting knocked cold again.