By Scott Gilfoid: Former IBF super middleweight champion Lucian Bute (30-1, 24 KO’s) has decided to test himself by facing one of the hardest punchers in the light heavyweight division in unbeaten NABF light heavyweight champion Denis Grachev (12-0-1, 8 KO’s) this Saturday night at the Bell Centre, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Bute realizes that this is a dangerous fight and that it could mess things up permanently for his hoped for rematch against Carl Froch next year but Bute doesn’t care. He’d rather find out whether he still has his talent or not sooner rather than stringing it out for a long time before he finds out the truth.

According to fightnews.com, Bute’s trainer has noticed that Bute’s punch volume has been dropping in recent years from 100 punches thrown per round to a tiny fraction of that. It’s not something that can be explained away by simply Bute scoring more knockouts, because he’s simply not throwing shots like he used earlier in his career,

Bute told fightnews.ca “If I don’t do well against Grachev, there won’t be any talk at all for a rematch with Froch.”

It would be a pity if Bute couldn’t get a crack at avenging his loss against Froch because Bute made so many mistakes in that fight that he could easily fix in a rematch and beat him. However, Bute is taking a big risk in taking on Grachev because this guy could ruin Bute’s plans for a Froch rematch by knocking him out cold. I think Froch would have big problems against a puncher like Grachev himself because he’s been stunned before in fights and Grachev would walk though his arm punches just to get to Froch’s lantern jaw.

Bute didn’t look good in taking power shots in his last fight, and he just looked frozen like he’d lost his hand speed or wasn’t warmed up or something. I don’t know what’s going on with his workrate but he’s going to up it against Grachev because if he’s not getting any resistance in the form of countless shots he’ll walk Bute down and knock him out like he did Ismayl Sillakh last April.