Bute vs Pascal: Fighters make weight for Saturday night's HBO main event

Lucian Bute and Jean Pascal are ready to go for tomorrow night's HBO main event in what is being hyped as the "Super Bowl of Canadian boxing," as the two adopted sons of Montreal headline at the Bell Centre in front of what should be a packed house and a rowdy audience.

Bute weighed in at 173.6 for the 175-pound main event, with Pascal hitting the limit on the nose. Bute (31-1, 24 KO) is fighting for the first time since November 2012, but Pascal (28-2-1, 17 KO) has fought only a pair of very easy tune-up bouts since May 2011, so there are rust concerns on both sides.

In the heavyweight co-feature, unbeaten Mike Perez (20-0, 12 KO) returns to HBO to face veteran Carlos Takam (29-1, 23 KO) in a fight scheduled for 10 rounds. Perez, one of the "Irish Cubans," is coming off of a win over Magomed Abdusalamov in November, while Takam, a Cameroonian living and fighting out of France, has recent wins over Frans Botha and Michael Grant, as apparently he's been revisiting the 90s.

Perez weighed in at 231.2 pounds, with Takam at 256.2.