The early part of the PGA TOUR season generally represents a fall break for the world’s top players, who tend to decrease their competitive reps after the President’s Cup and keep their bodies fresh for the important spring and summer tournaments.
The calendar’s turn to 2025 represents the start of that ramp-up, with The Sentry in Hawaii hosting 60 of the world’s best players — anyone who won a tournament during the 2023-24 season, plus the top 50 finishers in last season’s FedEx Cup standings. It will be the first among the PGA TOUR’s eight signature events, offering a $20 million prize and $3.6 million to the winner. With last season’s PGA TOUR Player of the Year, Scottie Scheffler, sidelined with a hand injury, the tournament is wide open.
Set your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups here: PGA TOUR $500K Pitch-and-Putt [$100K to 1st] (PGA TOUR).
The Plantation Course at Kapalua, where the annual tournament is held, is one of the longest and most wide-open courses on the PGA TOUR; at 7,596 yards, it’s the circuit’s only Par 73. It has a lot of undulation and wide fairways, and with plenty of downhill tee shots and warm temperatures, players can bomb away freely. The course’s wide-open nature should benefit the tour’s best ball-strikers, making Japanese star Hideki Matsuyama ($9,660) one of the top contenders to win the tournament. The 2021 Masters champion ranked third in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green during the 2024 season and is currently the sixth-ranked player in the world.
While Matsuyama has never won The Sentry and struggled last year, finishing just 58th, he was the runner-up to Justin Thomas in 2017 and knows the course well. He’s also in good form, coming off a season in which he won two tournaments, made 19 of his 20 cuts, and finished in the top ten seven times. He also won the Fedex St. Jude Championship in August and tying for second at the Dunlop Phoenix Tournament on the Japan Golf Tour in November, marking two top-five finishes in his five most recent starts. He’s the fourth-best player in the field at The Sentry and has only the sixth-highest salary.
As is always the case for Matsuyama, it will come down to his performance on the putting green. Matsuyama is one of the most well-rounded players in the world, putting up elite stats off the tee, on approach shots, around the green, and overall, but he was only 121st in Strokes Gained: Putting during the 2023-24 season. Matsuyama’s flat stick will be especially critical on a course whose harder-than-average greens are virtually its only defense.
However, he has historically putted well on the Bermuda greens that he will face at The Plantation Course. Of his 10 career wins, two have come at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, topping the leaderboard in 2016 and 2017, when TPC Scottsdale’s Stadium Course used Bermuda grass on its greens. He also won the 2022 Sony Open at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu, which also uses Bermuda grass.
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