In just six days, the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder will take the court in Oklahoma City as the Thunder get their long-awaited rings, and the 2025-26 NBA season will officially be underway. The 82 regular season games will crescendo into a 16-win battle of attrition next spring.
Regular season wins are less important than playoff wins, of course, but you can’t go on a playoff run if you don’t make the playoffs. In this article, I’ll run through my three favorite team win total bets at DraftKings Sportsbook, which you can bet on by clicking here.
Cleveland Cavaliers
Under 56.5 Wins (-105)
This is no disrespect to the Cavaliers, whose 64-18 regular season in 2024-25 came as a surprise and included two 15-plus-game winning streaks. Cleveland has an experienced and battle-tested core of Donovan Mitchell, Darius Garland, Evan Mobley, and Jarrett Allen and intriguing depth pieces like Lonzo Ball and De’Andre Hunter. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see the Cavaliers win 57 games, but given that I picked them to win 54 or fewer games before their projected win total increased, I’m sticking to my guns.
Perhaps it’s precisely because of their playoff failure last season that I don’t think they will emphasize the regular season as much in 2025-26. They were remarkably healthy in 2024-25, as Mitchell, Garland, Mobley, and Allen combined to play 299 of a possible 328 games, several of which were designated rest days towards the end of the season. All the extra basketball took its toll, as Garland missed four playoff games, Mobley missed one, and Mitchell was hobbled by a sprained ankle, and they crashed out in five games to the Indiana Pacers. Garland only just returned to limited five-on-five work as he recovers from toe surgery and will likely miss at least the first few weeks of the regular season, and Max Strus, who was a regular starter in the second half of the season, underwent a foot procedure. Kenny Atkinson will be cautious with both players and with the oft-injured Ball.
Five of Cleveland’s first six games are against teams that made the postseason last season, starting with an opening night clash at Madison Square Garden against the New York Knicks, which isn’t exactly an easy place to play, even if it won both of its games there last season. Matchups against the Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics will be easier than they were last season given Jayson Tatum’s injury and Damian Lillard’s injury (and subsequent release), but those teams won’t be complete pushovers, either. It wouldn’t be a massive surprise for the Cavaliers to get off to, say, a 9-4 start before Garland returns, and they’ll still have to play 30 games against West teams. Even last season, they played to just a 56-win pace after January 12.
LA Clippers
Over 48.5 Wins (+100)
These Clippers are one of the oldest teams in NBA history, with Chris Paul (40), Brook Lopez (37), James Harden (36), Nicolas Batum (36), Kawhi Leonard (34), Bogdan Bogdanović (33), Bradley Beal (32), and Kris Dunn (31) all figuring to play some role in the rotation this season. Standard logic would track that an old team should be built for the playoffs, not the regular season, but these players have managed to remain in the NBA past their 30th birthdays for a reason: they’re still really good. Paul played all 82 games last season for a San Antonio Spurs team that was 3.9 points per 100 possessions better with him on the court than off, and Beal still had a 57.1% effective field goal percentage for a dysfunctional Phoenix Suns team. The last time I undertook this exercise — on July 7, when I picked LA to go over 45.5 wins — the Clippers hadn’t yet signed either Paul or Beal.
The biggest X-factor is Leonard’s health. Fun Guy missed the first two and a half months of the season while recovering from offseason knee surgery, but once he returned, he was brilliant, averaging 21.5 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 1.6 steals per game while making 49.8% of his field goal attempts and 41.1% of his triples. LA went 26-11 in the games he played, a 58-win pace, and it added depth in the frontcourt by bringing in a solid rim protector and shooter in Lopez and a glass-cleaning lob threat in John Collins, who should be squarely in his prime at age 28. Of course, the deal to bring in Collins cost the Clippers Norman Powell, who averaged an efficient 21.8 points per game last season, but Powell is a negative on defense and wasn’t the most natural fit next to Harden.
This team won 50 games last season after ending the season on a 17-4 run, and barring a major injury to Harden or Leonard, there’s really no reason to expect regression. Any individual regression by some of the older players should be offset by the team’s depth, since Paul is more likely to excel in a 65-game, 24-minute role than he is in an 82-game, 28-minute role like he played last season. The younger players LA does have are pretty good: 28-year-old center Ivica Zubac finished second in Most Improved Player voting and is arguably the league’s best defensive center not named Victor Wembanyama. Sure, the West has gotten stronger, but the Clippers went just 3-5 last season against the conference’s most improved teams, the Houston Rockets and Denver Nuggets.
Indiana Pacers
Indiana Pacers Over 37.5 Wins (-110)
Indiana’s chances of competing for an NBA title this season crumbled in Game 7 of last season’s Finals, when Tyrese Haliburton went down with a torn Achilles tendon in the first quarter. In an instant, the Pacers’ offseason plans changed, and instead of going into the luxury tax for the first time in franchise history to re-sign center Myles Turner, they opted to let him walk to the rival Milwaukee Bucks and have yet to adequately address the center position, bringing in only Memphis Grizzlies deep reserve Jay Huff to compete with incumbents Isaiah Jackson and James Wiseman, who are both coming off of torn Achilles of their own. There’s a reason that, when we did this exercise earlier in the summer, my colleague Alex Hunter decided to back Indiana not to hit its win total, then set to 38.5.
37.5 wins is a pretty low bar, which the Pacers have hit in 10 of their last 12 82-game regular seasons. Of course, they missed that mark in both 2021-22 and 2022-23, but trading for Pascal Siakam at the 2023-24 deadline made all the difference. Siakam is extremely durable: he hasn’t missed more than 16 games in a season since his rookie year, when he spent some time with the Toronto Raptors’ G-League affiliate, the Raptors 905 and helped lead them to a league title. He’s also a consummate winner, as his team has won 41 or more games in all but one of his seasons and he had the league’s eighth-best on-off mark last season. In the sole exception to his winning ways, Stanley Johnson and Chris Boucher led the team in games played. This Indiana team — with playoff breakout star Andrew Nembhard, sharpshooter Aaron Nesmith, contract season Bennedict Mathurin, and one of the league’s best coaches in newly-extended Rick Carlisle — is much better.
Haliburton will be very difficult to replace, given that his three-point shooting and playmaking helps the Pacers’ system hum, but Indiana still out-scored opponents by 0.8 points per 100 possessions without him last season and went a solid 4-5 in the regular season games he missed. Haliburton suffered his injury with the Pacers trailing by two in Game 7, and Indiana actually led by one at halftime against the 68-win Oklahoma City Thunder before collapsing with Siakam off the floor in the third quarter. Turner’s 15.6 points, 2.0 blocks, and 39.6% three-point shooting will also be missed, but the Pacers also outscored opponents without Turner on the floor last regular season, and his inability to rebound and poor shooting in the Finals arguably cost Indiana an NBA title. The Pacers could still trade for a center if the Huff experiment doesn’t work out, and Siakam and Toppin both have plenty of experience playing the 5.
