Niko Price vs Leon Shahbazyan Preview & Prediction — UFC Fight Night: Allen vs. Duncan

Niko Price and Leon Shahbazyan meet in a fight built on one question: does Price's fading chin matter more than Shahbazyan's history of folding under exactly the pressure Price brings? The model reads this as a stylistic mismatch that favors Price, even with his recent skid factored in.

Niko Price

Price's whole game is walking forward behind low kicks and heavy hands, and the tape backs it up: full fights against Luque and Cerrone show that pressure-and-low-kick approach holding up over three rounds, not just flashes of it. The problem is what happens when he's the one getting hurt. He has lost four straight and been finished in three straight, and all three of those finishes came by submission: a D'Arce choke to Luque and rear-naked chokes to Jacobe Smith and Michael Chiesa. The pattern is consistent. Price exposes his back and neck on get-ups and loses the standing seatbelt battle once the fight hits the fence or the floor. At 37, that defensive lapse looks less like a one-off and more like erosion.

Leon Shahbazyan

Shahbazyan brings real finishing instincts on the mat, built on a string of submission wins, and on paper that grappling game lines up with Price's documented choke problem. But his losses tell a different story about what happens when he's the one under fire. All five have come by knockout or technical knockout, four of them inside the first round, and the two that are on tape, against Loder in 2023 and Chokheli this past June, show the same breakdown both times. He backs straight to the fence, stops checking low kicks, and freezes in a static shell instead of circling or firing back. That is not a small sample of bad luck. It is a repeatable failure point, and it shows up early.

How the fight plays out

The path for Shahbazyan runs through the clinch and the mat, where his submission instincts could tag Price's known choke flaw. But getting there means surviving the first round against a fighter whose entire identity is pressure and low kicks, and that is the exact formula that has ended all five of Shahbazyan's losses. If he backs to the fence and stops checking kicks the way he did against Loder and Chokheli, Price does not need a finishing sequence off the feet before the grappling game ever opens up. The counter-case is Price's decline: four straight losses, three of them chokes, and a 37-year-old's back defense that is not what it was. That decline is real, but it only matters if the fight gets to the mat, and Shahbazyan's own tape says he has not been able to survive long enough to get it there. The pressure-and-kicks blueprint comes first, and on the available evidence it travels.

The verdict

The call here is Price. Shahbazyan's finishing losses are a round-one pattern against exactly the pressure and low-kick style Price still brings for three rounds, and that pattern has to break before his grappling and submission game ever gets a look. Price's fading chin and choke history are real concerns, but they are second-round problems, and this fight does not reliably get there.