Put the two loss columns side by side and the whole fight is there. Ikram Aliskerov has lost twice in twenty professional fights, both times in the first round, both times to punches, both times to one of the best middleweights of the era — Khamzat Chimaev in 2019 and Robert Whittaker in 2024. He has never lost on the cards. Jared Cannonier has lost ten times and has never been submitted; seven of those losses are decisions, and four of his last five defeats came from being out-worked over the distance rather than stopped. Each man's failure mode is a specific trigger. For Aliskerov it is getting hit clean and early by a real puncher. For Cannonier it is being out-volumed and out-positioned for fifteen minutes. On current form, Aliskerov's wrestling-and-volume game is built to trigger Cannonier's. Cannonier's counter right is the only tool on either side that has triggered Aliskerov's.
The most important numbers in this fight are not in any career line. In his last two fights Cannonier landed 35 significant strikes in 30 minutes and absorbed 97; in the nineteen UFC fights before that he landed 4.60 per minute. Some of the drop is the opponents — Michael Page is built to make people miss and Duncan is long and mobile — and some is choice: he spent 14:26 of those 30 minutes in his own control position and did almost nothing from it, and the judges gave him 4 of 18 rounds. Across the age-40 line he went from 7-2 to 0-3 against ranked opponents, and he has never won a three-round decision at middleweight. The model treats the career line as his ceiling and the last-two line as closer to his current level. That is the main reason he sits at 32% rather than 45% in a fight where he carries the more dangerous single weapon.
The open stance is where that weapon lives. Aliskerov is a southpaw range striker who closes on straight lines — 83.9% of his significant strikes land at distance, 2.1% in the clinch — to land and to shoot. That style produced 24.2 significant strikes per first round and three knockouts; it also produced a 45% striking defense and two knockouts against him from opponents who hit him coming forward. Cannonier is a counter-puncher with a 55% striking defense and a little more reach, which is why his KO/TKO bucket (18) is not far below Aliskerov's (22) even though Aliskerov is the far better striker on paper. The limit is that a counter-puncher needs the other man to come to him, and the Aliskerov of the last two fights mostly came in low, for takedowns — ten of them in thirty minutes, two of them inside the first five minutes against Ferreira.