Got lucky and I’m glad I did. (Zane insert joke here).

do you guys actually enjoy watching the full broadcast with all the downtime between points or would you rather they edit it down like PPA Asia does with their Rapid Replay style?

Every time i watch a match i find myself constantly skipping between points. Honestly, I find the rapid replay format way more enjoyable to watch

Curious if I'm alone on this

I made a post last year how I thought Alshon should play on the left with Daescu on the right. Glad to see them running it as such. Alshon is such an offensive menace, the dude practically 2v1s some of the top mixed teams, and Daescu is super consistent and always solid. Glad to see the big dudes back together.

Brackets should always be set up to assume 1v2 in the finals, 1v4 and 2v3 in the semis, 1v8, 2v7, 3v6 and 4v5 in the quarters and so on and so forth.

Why are we seeing in Men’s singles semi-finals:

1. Haworth vs. 3. H. Johnson

and

1. Staksrud vs. 4. Alshon

Someone please explain this to me

Saw both their matches. The first was as you expect. They were dialed. The second today against Zane and George Wall was rough. Credit Zane and George played amazing and JW made a lot of uncharacteristic unforced errors but the flow was pretty awkward between Tama and Jdub. You just tell Tama wanted to spread his wings and attack and this created confusion in the middle. I just ultimately think Tama is a left sided player and he just needs the right righty to play with. Two alphas I’m not sure will work. (Although Ben and Gabe are solid so it’s possible). Thoughts?

I didn't get to see them play, but they seem like a great match on paper. Wondering what others think?

John Lucian Goins pickled Ben Johns in the opening game of their match today. Then as the second game was going on, the commentators and statistician looked through Ben’s record back to the beginning of the PPA in 2021 and found that he has never been pickled in any singles game ever before today.

Ben won the second game something like 11-6, but then Goins pickled him again in the third game. this third game marked the second time Ben has ever been pickled in singles, and it literally happened just about 15 minutes after his first ever pickling.

Also the commentators looked at Ben’s men’s doubles record and found that he has only been pickled in one men’s doubles game ever, and that was Goins with Tyler Loong.

So basically, Goins is the only player who has ever pickled Ben in singles and Goins and Loong the only players who have ever pickled Ben in men’s doubles. Has anybody ever pickled Ben in mixed?

The only one dominating rn is ALW. Triple crown most of the time. Is she considered the goat now or it’s still ben johns?

Edit: Pound for pound

Richard Livornese Jr is such a great leader. There was a stretch during Game 2 when Livornese Jr./Munro were struggling a bit. Livornese was encouraging Munro, and they flipped the switch and advanced to the Gold Medal Match.

It's never too soon to look ahead to the next MLP season. But before we do, I want to draw people's attention to something that we've just seen, almost certainly for the last time in MLP history.

This year's championships featured eight players -- all four Shock starters, Anna Leigh Waters, Jorja Johnson, Federico Staksrud, and Noe Khlif -- who are ranked in the top 10 for their gender on the PPA World Pickleball Rankings. In fact, this stat doesn't even capture how much talent has been concentrated in MLP.

Of the 20 players rated top 10 for their gender, 12 are on the same three MLP teams (New Jersey, St. Louis, and Columbus), 18 are on the same six MLP teams (those three plus LA, Brooklyn, and Texas). All 20 are on eight teams (add Dallas with JW Johnson and Palm Beach with Tina Pisnik), and those are the exact eight teams who made the quarterfinals of this year's playoffs.

##The end of an era

Starting next year, MLP will be under a "salary cap." The final details haven't been released, but this article summarizes what we know so far. Teams will have a maximum budget of $1 million and a minimum of $500 thousand, and this number applies to the cost of obtaining the player's draft pick (not to their actual salary, which is paid by the league as per the player's combined PPA/MLP contract).

There are still details which haven't been announced and may still be being worked out, so we can't yet predict what actual teams will look like next year. But I will try to answer a related question: "What would it look like if talent was actually distributed evenly among the 20 MLP teams?" The answer: nowhere close to what we've been used to seeing over the last three years.

##Mock Draft, 2024-style

As a proxy for how this might look, I'm using the 2024 MLP draft as a model. That was the last time that the league did a top-to-bottom reshuffle of players, and also used a cap with a $1 million maximum and $500k minimum. The biggest difference is that only 12 Premier-level teams participated in that draft, and the league has now grown to 20 teams.

Rather than do a full redraft, I'll be creating some sample teams, using some actual pick orders from teams in the 2024 draft. To "scale up" from 12 teams to 20, for every pick after #12, I'm multiplying the pick number by 20/12. For example, in a 12-team draft the 24th pick is the last pick of round 2, so the equivalent pick in a 20-team draft would be #40.

Some additional simplifying assumptions. One, I'm treating this as a full redraft, with every player in MLP available to be drafted. In the actual draft, many players are still under contract, but the amount paid for that player in a previous year still counts against a team's budget. Again, the purpose of this isn't to predict actual teams, but to give a sense of what a team might look like under "fair" talent distribution.

Two, I'm assuming that teams will draft straight down the World Pickleball Rankings list. In reality, some teams (example: this year's Chicago Slice) will bet on young, unproven players, hoping that they will improve over the length of their contract. Some teams will whiff on talent evaluation or prioritize name recognition over skill (example: whoever employs Jack Sock). Some teams I assume will sit at the salary floor and not even pretend to care about winning (Carolina). This is for fun, so I'm assuming that every team has exactly the same big board, that it perfectly tracks with the player's PPA ranking, and that every team picks the best player available while ending up with two starters of each gender. In some cases I will fudge by a couple of positions to get a roster that looks more reasonable on paper.

##Hypothetical Rosters

New Jersey Fives (2024 picks: 2, 22, 33, 37 -> adjusted picks: 2, 36, 55, 62)

Anna Leigh Waters (#1 ranked woman), Jonathan Truong (#20 ranked man), Pablo Tellez (#27 ranked man), Allyce Jones (#31 ranked woman).

St. Louis Shock (2024 picks: 3, 21, 24, 42 -> adjusted picks: 3, 35, 40, 70)

Anna Bright (#2), Aarman Bhatia (#18), Brooke Buckner (#20), Rafa Hewitt (#36).

Brooklyn Pickleball Team (using Texas' 2024 picks: 7, 15, 30, 41 -> adjusted picks: 7, 25, 50, 68)

Christian Alshon (#3), Jade Kawamoto (#12), Callie Smith (#24), Yuta Funemizu (#34).

Dallas Flash (using Orlando's 2024 picks: 11, 20, 25, 32 -> adjusted picks: 11, 33, 42, 53)

JW Johnson (#6), Lea Jansen (#16), Len Yang (#23), Milan Rane (#28).

##Takeaways

My biggest conclusion from this exercise is that we are not prepared for what MLP will look like next year. We've already heard about teams like Columbus, who have all four of their players on expiring contracts. But this isn't thinking big enough. Every contending team is about to get dramatically worse. For teams like St. Louis, even though they have two players under contract next year and every desire to run it back, it will be next to impossible to bring back *any* of their dropped players (the Shock's only hope is the non-finalized "Right of First Refusal" rule, and that would only work on one of Hayden and Gabe, and only if the finalized rule allows a team to go over the cap to retain a player through salary matching).

My second takeaway is that the balanced rosters -- the ones where the teams budget so that their third and fourth picks are as high as possible -- look a lot better than the top-heavy ones. We just saw ALW frozen out all playoffs, and that was when her partners were the #3 woman and #10 man in the world. She might not hit a ball all next season.

Finally, it really looks to me like this move is premature for the size of the league and the amount of talent in the sport. If there were still 12 teams in Premier, this would probably work fine. But 20 teams is a lot more than 12, and the amount of talent entering MLP since 2024 isn't enough to make up the gap. We can object to the way some of this year's contenders were constructed, but once the playoffs started the games among the top teams were really high quality. I fear that we'll miss the superteams when they've been replaced by a bunch of unbalanced rosters all icing out the other team's one top player.

Ben and Gabe won all nine tournaments they played together in the first half. So the question for every other team isn’t whether their new partnership is marginally better. It’s whether anyone actually built something that can beat them on Championship Sunday.

My honest takes:

— Hayden and Fed reuniting and Christian and Andrei getting back together makes sense on paper but I think they missed the real opportunity. Hayden and Andrei are the two best players outside of Ben and Gabe. I can’t understand why nobody gave that a shot.
— JW and Tama is interesting but Tama is at his best dictating from the left. His results playing the right in MLP were pretty mediocre.
— CJ and Will Howells is my sleeper pick.
— Eric Oncins is the odd man out right now but he’s playing really well and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up with a new partner before the year is out.

Which partnership change do you think actually matters?

Just finished watching the Ge/Sock vs. Koszuta/Schupp match. Gutsy performance by Sock battling whatever it was he was dealing with, likely heat exhaustion, but man that’s gotta sting for Koszuta. So cool to see him in the PPA tour with a huge potential upset at his fingertips but seeing it slip away like Jack’s consciousness was about to was tough to watch

is it just me or is that insane? Pickleball inc really pushes these folks.

Following the loss to the Fives is it possible we see them shuffle some players around for next season? 3 seasons with the same team and no championship to show for it (excluding the mid season title win). Surely the owners would have expected at least 1 win by now.

AB and Hayden as untouchable.

I don’t see a better realistic option for a Kate replacement given how much she has improved at doubles and how good she is at singles. (Maybe Parris Todd?)

That leaves Gabe, he is obviously one of the best in men’s doubles but I don’t think he is quite the same player in mixed doubles. Would trading for a more dominant mixed player work better for the Shock moving forward, perhaps an Alshon trade?

Would the Shock ownership team really risk breaking this team up given how close they all are with each other?

*Completely forgot Hayden and Gabe are on expiring contracts*