Axios

LOS ANGELES — Kawhi Leonard (30 pts) and the Clippers beat LeBron James (18-9-8) and the Lakers, 112-102, in a star-studded season opener at Staples Center.

Details: All 4 Clippers' bench players scored in double-digits, while Leonard was the only starter with more than 8 points.

The Nationals entered last night's game as the biggest World Series underdog in more than a decade. They'll wake up this morning in full control after handing Astros ace Gerrit Cole his first loss since May.

What's next: The Nationals will send Stephen Strasburg to the mound in Game 2 tonight, while the Astros will counter with Justin Verlander.

Unicorns have roamed NBA pastures for years, transforming the sport of basketball with their unique blend of size, skill and athleticism.

The intrigue: These generational big men have started to come of age, graduating from "he's going to be an MVP candidate one day" to, well, MVP candidates.

It's been eight years since a team other than the Warriors or Spurs won the Western Conference. That's bound to change this season — and two of the teams that will be battling for supremacy play in the same city.

The big picture: While title contenders are only just now returning to Los Angeles, it's been the center of the NBA universe for a while now.

In an attempt to predict the 2019-20 NBA season's best players, Axios, TrueHoop and machine learning experts Harrison Chase and Anthony Liu have partnered to present the "2020 BPM projections."

How it works: Chase and Liu built smart models to predict a player's Box Plus-Minus (BPM) — similar to Real Plus-Minus — for the upcoming season.

• In short, BPM is a measure of a player's performance relative to league average on a per 100 possessions scale. +5 is roughly All-NBA level, 0 is league average, -2 is replacement level, -5 is really bad.
• For reference, the top 5 players according to BPM last season were James Harden (11.7), Giannis Antetokounmpo (10.8), Nikola Jokic (9.5), Anthony Davis (8.5) and LeBron James (8.1).

Worth noting: "Ben Simmons and Donovan Mitchell are projected to have career years. Andre Drummond and Draymond Green are expected to have bounce-back years (albeit not career years)," according to Chase and Liu.

• "Overall though, our model is definitely on the conservative side of things; it will be rare for it to predict any large jumps for players that already have high BPM."

Go deeper: To read more about the methodology, click here.