Unlike last season, the LA Clippers will have Kawhi Leonard available for the first game of the season when they open the 2025-26 campaign with a 9:10 p.m. ET clash against the woeful Utah Jazz at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City. After last season ended with a seven-game defeat to the Denver Nuggets in the first round of the playoffs, LA was one of the league’s most active teams during the offseason and projects to be a fringe championship contender.
Despite playing just 37 games last season, Leonard was one of the league’s most valuable players, averaging an efficient 21.5 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 1.6 steals per game during the regular season and appearing — at times — the best player on the floor in a series featuring three-time MVP Nikola Jokić.
The Clippers are 9.5-point favorites for tonight’s clash at DraftKings Sportsbook, with the total set to 225.5. Below, I’ve highlighted my favorite prop bets centered around Fun Guy.
Best Kawhi Leonard Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Kawhi Leonard 25+ Points (+122)
Whether or not Leonard can get to 25 points tonight depends not on whether the Jazz can stop him — they can’t — but on whether he wants to. As long as he’s healthy, Leonard is always an excellent bet to score an efficient 25 points; after the All-Star break, he averaged 25.0 points on 52-44-81 shooting splits and reached that threshold in 12 of his 22 games, as well as twice more in the postseason. So far, there’s been no indication that Leonard is anything less than 100%, so he won’t have any sort of a minutes restriction. He’s capable of big performances in Salt Lake City: the last time he played there, in 2023, he scored 41 points on 14-for-23 shooting.
Utah, mired in the depths of a lengthy rebuild, is even worse than the team that struggled to contain Leonard on that December evening. Last season, the Jazz finished with the league’s worst defensive rating while playing at its sixth-fastest pace, and they let go of all of their veterans except for Lauri Markkanen, who’s only an average defender even when he’s engaged. Utah’s young core, which features fifth overall pick Ace Bailey and a guard duo in Keyonte George and Isaiah Collier, is oriented towards scoring, not stopping. The only above-average defender in the Jazz’s likely rotation is center Walker Kessler, who led all qualifying players in blocks per game last season, but Leonard has taken fewer shots at the rim as he’s aged.
Kawhi Leonard 3+ Three-Pointers Made (+171)
This bet is somewhat contingent on the first: of the 14 regular-season games in which Leonard scored 25 or more points last season, he hit three or more triples in eight of them, including in each of the seven highest-scoring games. Plus, while he’s more known as a midrange ace, last season represented the third-highest three point attempt rate of his career. He also tried six three-pointers per game during the preseason despite playing an average of just 21.4 minutes of action.
Unsurprisingly, Utah also hemorrhaged triples last season. Though the Jazz held opponents to a respectable 35.8% — the 12th-lowest mark in the league — they allowed a league-high 14.9 makes per game. That low percentage can predominantly be attributable to luck; they conceded 23.0 wide-open triples per game, the most in the NBA, and were quite fortunate that opponents converted at the fourth-lowest rate. Utah can’t rely on getting that lucky against Leonard, who canned 46.7% of his wide-open triples in 2024-25, the 26th-best accuracy among 307 players to attempt at least 50 such shots.
