St. Louis Wins The Major League Pickleball Regular Season Title and LA Mad Drops Makes Noise In Dallas
Major League Pickleball (MLP), presented by DoorDash, rolled into the 9th of its 10 week season, inexorably grinding to the finish line of the regular season. The tour was in the Dallas Metroplex, specifically at the Pickler Universe in suburb Carrollton for the Advil Targeted relief MLP Dallas 2025 event. For the third week in a row (Beer City's excitement and then St. Louis' debut event within an arena), the sentiment is that MLP as a league has set a new bar, with massive crowds and an electric atmosphere inside the club.
The weekend's slate was a collection of 'haves' and 'have not' teams in the league: it included the top three teams in the standings (STL, home-team Dallas, and NJ), new-look LA (more on that later), the frisky Texas Ranchers, and then basically the four worst teams in the league playing out the string in Carolina, Phoenix, SoCal, and the last-place NY Hustlers. This made for, in the same weekend, the best collection of matches we've seen all year amongst the top teams alongside some of the worst blow-outs of the year.
There were no Challenger teams playing this week; they'll finish up their season at Event #10 in a week's time in Salt Lake.
Key Links for tracking the event this weekend, which featured livestreams from the two primary courts at the facility on MLP's YouTube channel and on PickleballTV.com.
Transaction Recap
Ben Johns sporting the LA Mad Drops gear for the first time post-trade.
The MLP trade deadline for the season was the Monday before this event … and it was a banger. Headlined by the Ben Johns trade, there were twelve separate transactions conducted in this last-minute window, as some teams clearly are waving the white flag for the season, while others are doubling down to push for a title. Here's a brief summary of all moves team by team (some of these conflate multiple moves):
At the end of the day, Carolina is left with basically six waiver wire/challenger players to go along with half a million dollars of cash. Miami traded away their two best players and is probably looking at next year. LA could be the favorite going forward, New Jersey probably likes its chances by improving their weakest link, Orlando, and Utah both marginally improved their starting lineups, and Dallas now has a solid bench just in case. All the involved Challenger teams improved a bit, looking to move up on the top dog Las Vegas for the one promotion spot up for grabs.
News and Noteworthy
Premier League Recap
Day 1 Observations
Blaine Hovenier is a big reason SoCal competes in 2025.
Day 2 Observations
Day 3 Observations
Noe Khlif (L) slams an overhead with New Jersey as partner Will Howells looks on.
Day 4 Observations
Team Standings Update post Event
Here's the teams who made moves up or down the Standings in this event.
In Premier
What did we learn this weekend?
What were our top three Takeaways from the competition this weekend?
Media Pick' Em Contest Update
MLP Super-Fan Matty Pickles (aka Matt Klitch) runs a season-long Media MLP Pick'em Contest on Twitter, where all the pundits in the sport are participating. Here's how we did this week, and where we stand overall.
Summary: This was the hardest week yet to predict, since we were all just guessing how well the new Ben Johns-led LA Mad Drops would perform. I only hit on 4 of the 8 picks this week, but got a bonus point for my 'lock' of the weekend and netted 5 points. However the race is tightening; 2nd place Jim Kloss missed on his lock but otherwise went 7-8 in his picks to climb within 3 points of the lead.
Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule ...
Next up for the MLP? Their next event is ....
All match stats quoted in this article are courtesy of PickleWave. Visit picklewave.com for the premier source of Pro Pickleball data, including match replays, highlights, stats, and discussion. PickleWave has more than 22,000 matches in its database across all the pro tours.
Also, a great thanks to The Dink's Erik Tice, who maintains a fantastic MLP detailed data breakdown and makes it publicly available at this Google XLS link. Tice's data has proved invaluable this year as MLP does not make match data available at this detailed level at present.
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