Major League Pickleball Chicago Slice GM Saslow discusses his 2025 Draft Strategy

Forbes

23-04-2025

Apparently, the Slice's logo is left handed.
One of the biggest question marks heading into the 2025 Major League Pickleball draft was this: how were the newly promoted Chicago Slice going to build their 2025 team? They finished in first place during the 2024 Challenger regular season but faced the unique position of not being able to retain any one of their four players for the 2025 season thanks to contract issues. It was the same position the New York Hustlers found themselves in, though theirs was a purposeful dismantling of last year's playoff team. Nonetheless, leading up to the draft both ownership groups faced large questions as to how they'd build a competitive team for 2025.
At the 2025 draft in March, we saw the Chicago Slice take aggressive steps towards building a team out of waiver wire picks, and they emerged with a squad that many of us pickleball pundits believe will be a playoff team in year one, completely built out of the existing waiver pool.
Read here for a MLP Premier Draft running diary published on March 3rd, 2025, and here for a post-Draft Analysis and Draft Grades published on March 5th, 2025.
In late March 2025, I caught up with Chicago Slice majority owner and general manager Ron Saslow, owner of 35 Capital and the general manager of the squad. He talked about his team's approach to this season's draft and a slew of other MLP related topics. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, with [salient data inserted in square brackets]
Boss: 'At what point in the off-season draft preparation did your team make the decision to 'go for it' and try to build a team with major fund allocation in the 2025 draft?'
Saslow: "During the pre-draft season, we had a great team helping us and we played through different draft scenarios. One was a 'mad rush' of top eligible players,
other scenarios had the rebuilding teams [the four rising teams] as being less aggressive. We just didn't know how everyone was going to handle it. We had a plan, but we had to have lots of different versions of draft strategies."
Boss: 'Can you provide some background on your player selection strategy?'
Saslow: 'We use a fair amount of analytics, and match it up with educated gut feel and scouting. Our ownership group also includes paddle brands Paddletek & ProXR, and we have available resources from that side of the business. We're constantly working with players, we know them inside and out. It's kind of an unfair advantage in some respects since we're working with players 52 weeks of the year. I can't imagine there's another team in the league that knows players as well as we do.'
Boss: 'Talk us through the draft and your reaction to events in real-time.'
Saslow: "When draft started, the first couple picks went as expected [two of last year's top teams immediately rebought their dropped players to return their 2025 teams intact when the Shock took Kate Fahey with the 1st pick and Dallas picked Augustus Ge with the 2nd pick]
. Because we needed four new starters, it didn't make sense for us to go spend our entire budget on the top players available. But, as draft moved along, a couple picks in, we realized there was going to be talent available. So we went aggressive with Ignatowich [picked 5th overall for $90,000], then quickly build a team around him.
Once we landed James, we went after better ladies to fit scenarios [the team landed Vivienne David with the 9th overall pick for $80k and Callie Smith with the 12th overall pick for $70k]. Then with 4th pick we got a great underrated player in Max Freeman [selected 10th overall for $80k].
Boss: 'Did you have an overall budget in mind? Or was the plan to kind of see how things went?'
Saslow: "A little of both; we had a framework of a budget, but it was also going to depend on the direction of the draft. If we didn't think we could put together
a competitive team immediately, we would have pivoted for 2025 and gone more conservative. But we felt we could be aggressive and be relevant immediately.
so that's the direction we took."
Boss: 'Did you have any idea how much the slots would go for? $130k for the first pick, then the bidding seemed to get to the $100k plateau multiple times before tailing off as we moved forward.'
Saslow: We weren't totally surprised with $100k range of bids; most of the good teams were keeping 3/4ths of their team, so we just didn't have the 2024 mad rush
of a bidding frenzy. Plus, this year's expansion to 6 players, we thought teams wouldn't go crazy for one pick but would try to get 3-4 players for a chunk and spread around the money. A couple teams went big early, but most of the rest of the teams followed this pattern."
Boss: 'Did you loop in James after his first pick to help with the rest of the draft?'
Saslow: "Towards the end of the draft we looped in James; he was playing while we were drafting so couldn't get him immediately, but we did collaborate on later picks. As it turned out, James & Max were roommates in college, which we didn't even know, but once we knew that, it was an added bonus for sure. [Immediately after the draft, Freeman teamed with Ignatowich to play the Red Rock PPA event together].
Boss: 'Were there other factors in your draft strategy in terms of team construction?'
Saslow: 'It's not just about getting best players. It's really important to consider chemistry and to do player matchup analysis. Right and left sided players, gender and mixed. It's never as easy as just taking 'best player available.''
Boss: 'What was your opinion of your team in the immediate aftermath of the draft?'
Saslow: "Going into draft, we did not think we'd be as good as we ended up being, but being prepared helped. All credit is due to our draft team to be prepared and adapting. Our post-draft grades from writers bore this out [including my own, giving the team an A+ in my post-draft analysis].
Boss: 'What expectations do you have for the bench players Imparato and Di Laura?'
Saslow: "Carlos is our coach, so he is in a player/coach role. For both it's just a great opportunity to practice, get better, be stronger. Our expectation is that they'll participate [in matches] along the way. Some teams don't really focus on who's on the bench, just calling them practice or hitting partners. We are different; we think both can be MLP starters and will work with our four starters.'
Boss: 'Did you talk to any of your 2024 players to try to convince them to re-up with UPA so they would be eligible this year?'
Saslow: "Well, we knew one of the four wasn't going to be able to stay with us regardless [Megan Fudge, who was a mid-season waiver pickup]. Then, talking to the other three players [Jack Munro, Allison Harris, and Brendon Long] we knew they weren't going to participate. All of them are looking to play in other leagues and to play internationally. We would have been excited to keep them, but for their career goals they wanted to move on."
I finished off the interview with a few 'harder' questions.
Boss: "Why spend now? Chicago had an opportunity to 'buy' its way into the Premier league two years ago and chose not to."
Saslow: "Our thinking was that the first year out of merger things would be dicey. The season was rushed because of ongoing negotiations, and our feeling at the time was, despite being huge believers in MLP, that the first season was going to be rocky.
So, to us it wasn't as important to be in Premier year one. Lots of teams said, 'look it's worth it to guarantee never in challenger.' So they spent the money to ensure they were in premier year one.
There was no doubt in my mind, when we dropped to Challenger, that we'd be in Premier year two. We know players in and out. It may be false bravado but we knew we'd be a top team in Challenger and that we'd be immediately moving up.
So our strategy was, 'we know we'll be there in a year' so we decided to save the money in 2024 for 2025 and beyond. If you now look at what [Premier League teams] spent in 2024 versus what we're spending in 2025, we look a lot better off."
[This absolutely turned out to be true. Chicago was able to put together its 2025 starting four lineup for $320k. The smallest amount paid by a Premier league team to construct its lineup in 2024 was the Utah Black Diamonds, who spent just under $500k in the 2024 auction draft for its then roster of McGuffin, Loong, Smith, and Truong, then had to spend nearly $100k to retain Garnett, Loong, and Truong for their 2025 roster. All 11 other premier league teams spent at least $863k in the 2024 draft plus are on the hook for hundreds of thousands more in retention fees. Chicago's total outlay of $320k pales in comparison.]
Boss: 'Do you question the motives of some of the other teams, who didn't commit the same level of resources you did in this year's draft?'
[I'm specifically talking about New York here, if not explicitly stated, who spent just $110k total for its four starters despite acquiring nearly $500k in cash in off-season trades]
Saslow: "I'm not in the draft room or board room, so it's tough to judge them totally. If you only look at the snapshot versus the video, you might say they didn't do much, but it's a long season. There are trades, waivers, lots of opportunity to use that money and build as you go. If you look at all pro sports, you see teams who are in 'rebuilding mode' who choose to spend nothing instead of something, wait things out, get picks, and rebuild that way. They save that 'dry powder' until an opportunity presents itself.
There's another piece as well. Pickleball is a funny sport. It's not as developed professionally. Some of our star players now were not known even a year ago. So, a player isn't very expensive now, has high ceiling, maybe we get lucky with up and coming talent. That's not a terrible strategy. As an example, we did this the 1st year in challenger and got Connor Garnett; paid nothing for him."
[Garnett was the 28th overall pick in the Challenger draft in 2023, meaning he was the 76th player picked that season. Christian Alshon went one pick after him, just to give an idea of how improved players can get in a short amount of time right now in the pro pickleball landscape.]
Boss: 'Last 'Hard Question' Do you think MLP should change it competition structure to level the playing field for rising challenger teams?"
[The context here is obvious to MLP fans: Premier league teams already 'own' a huge percentage of the top players and they're not eligible for rising challenger teams. Some of the suggestions include reintroducing Promotion & Relegation and forcing the release of all relegated players, or an expansion draft where teams have to open up their existing rosters, or returning to true free agency where all teams are rebuilt each season as was done in 2022 and 2023].
Saslow: 'Well first, we just got rid of relegation. Promotion will continue until all teams in Premier.'
For the teams rising from Challenger, there was lots of talk and different opinions on what to do. MLP did lots of research, looked at other leagues, and in many of those cases they have developed rules for expansion drafts. MLP made some decisions to give some advantages for the rising teams to help them. The league listened to the teams, the competition committee discussed it, and as a league we arrived at a structure that made sense.
As an example: none of the existing premier league teams could pick bench players until all "main rosters" filled; this was a way to ensure rising challenger teams still had some talent available.
As far as big name players being made available; eventually those contracts will be up. So then it's back to wide open free agency, and we'll be back to a conventional pro league."
Boss: 'Thanks for your time. Anything else?'
Saslow: 'Make sure to follow us on social media, and we look forward to the 2025 season.'
Chicago (and the other 15 Premier league MLP teams) kick off their 2025 season this coming weekend April 24-27 in Orlando. Click here for the event home page.
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