Nzechukwu vs Gaziev: the eye poke that made his last fight a draw

Kennedy Nzechukwu has not had his hand raised in twenty months, and the reason is not that he lost.

His last fight, against Marcus Almeida at UFC Fight Night: Royval vs Kape on December 14, went to the cards as a unanimous draw. All three judges turned in 28-28. That is not a scoreline three rounds of scoring can produce on its own, and it did not: Nzechukwu was docked a point in the second round for an eye poke, and the deduction turned a night he was winning into a night nobody won.

Tonight he takes the second prelim slot at the Golden 1 Center against Shamil Gaziev, and he does it carrying that draw as the most recent line on his record.

The math of a 28-28

Work backwards from the cards. Over three rounds a judge hands out 29-28 or 30-27 in a normal fight. To land on 28-28 somebody has to lose a point.

The fan scoring collected on that bout tells you where it went. Of the 70 cards submitted, 81.4 percent gave Almeida nothing in round one. Then came the poke, and 71.4 percent of those same cards scored round two 10-8 the other way. The final tally: 7 cards for Nzechukwu, 29 for Almeida, and 34 calling it even. The public could not separate them either, which is what a deduction does to a fight.

Draws are rare in the UFC to begin with. Across our records, 62 of 4,111 UFC decisions have come back a draw, a hair over one and a half percent. Of the 55 of those we hold full scorecard data for, 19 involved a point deduction. So a third of the sport's draws are not two men being inseparable. They are one man being penalized.

That is the category Nzechukwu's last fight belongs to, and it is worth being precise about, because "0-1-1 in his last two" reads like a fighter in decline and the tape underneath says something narrower. His last actual loss was a first-round submission to Valter Walker in July 2025. His last actual win was a first-round knockout of Lukasz Brzeski in December 2024. Everything in between is a fight he was winning until he fouled.

What he is walking into

Gaziev has problems of his own, and they are more conventional. He is 36, he is 3-3 in the UFC, and he has been knocked out in each of his last two appearances: by Waldo Cortes Acosta in the first round last November, then by Brando Pericic in the second this May. Two stoppages in six months at heavyweight is the kind of run that gets a man matched carefully, and the UFC has matched him against a heavyweight who does not knock people down.

That last part is the tell. Nzechukwu throws 4.96 significant strikes a minute, but he also absorbs 4.58 and defends only 51 percent of what comes at him. Gaziev is slower, at 2.94 landed and 4.92 absorbed, with 45 percent striking defense. Neither of these men is hard to hit. Both of them have been finished by heavyweights recently.

What separates them on paper is grappling neither seems interested in using. Nzechukwu attempts half a takedown per fifteen minutes; Gaziev attempts one. Their takedown defense numbers, 80 percent and 83 percent, are strong and largely untested, because at heavyweight nobody bothers.

Our model gives Nzechukwu 58 percent. The market has him at +110, with Gaziev the modest favorite at -140 across the 25 books we track. That gap is not large, but it points the same direction it usually does with a fighter coming off consecutive knockout losses: the books have more faith in Gaziev than the numbers do.

The part that decides it

Two heavyweights who get hit, one of whom has been stopped twice this year, on a card that starts at 2 p.m. local time. This is not going to the scorecards.

Which, given how the last one went for Nzechukwu, may be the outcome he prefers. He has been on the wrong end of the judging math once already, and the fix for that is not a better third round. It is not needing one.

Nzechukwu vs Gaziev is the second prelim at UFC Fight Night: Hernandez vs Rodrigues tonight, with prelims from 2 p.m. PT and the main card at 5 p.m. PT on Paramount+.