2026 MLP Week 5 Round Up – St. Pete Takeaways, Trade and Franchise Tag Talk, New York Preview
It has very much been a high octane MLP season. There hasn’t been a moment to catch your breath as there always seems to be something interesting going on. St. Pete was no different as we had controversial substitutions, new rosters and more post-event trades / almost trades. Another week is in the books, and it is time to highlight the most important storylines to come out of St. Pete.
1. Cream of the Crop – There has been a bunch of shifting around of rosters, but the 3-year rise of this St. Louis Shock team is finally showing up in 2026. This is their 2nd consecutive event win, and they looked pretty much unstoppable, yet again. Kate Fahey is playing the best pickleball of her life, Anna Bright is proving to be worth every penny of the money spent on her in the draft and Patriquin and Tardio have been performing up to their billing as two top 5 dudes.
For all the talk about these revamped rosters, it is St. Louis that must be the consensus favorite at this point in the season. While Fahey/Bright isn’t the juggernaut that ALW/Jorja are, the Fahey spots are no longer the weak points for the Shock that they once were in women’s and mixed. Fahey’s only loss of the weekend was to Sofia Sewing/Tina Pisnik and she was the top player based on Real Clear Stats Player Impact + metric. The weekend included impressive wins over Tyra Black/Parris Todd, Parris Todd/Andrei Daescu and Catherine Parenteau/Jade Kawamoto.
Hell, the Shock only dropped two games the entire weekend, the other being a 12-10 men’s loss to Nico Acevedo/Eric Oncins. When this team is focused and firing on all cylinders, they are the best team in MLP and there’s really no question about it right now.
The biggest question of 2025 is now an even bigger one in 2026 considering the level at which the Shock is performing at right now. That is, can they bring this same level, or better, to the most pressure packed games and moments of MLP come playoff time?
2. Was it Worth it? – The Palm Beach Royals had a roller coaster of a weekend. After Dekel Bar hurt his hamstring, Grayson Goldin played against the St. Louis Shock on Thursday and he didn’t have his best showing, losing 11-3 in both his men’s match with Tyson and mixed match with Tina Pisnik. Later that evening, the UPA signed APP stalwart, Casey Diamond, and he was immediately added to the on-site alternates list, that is provided to teams before the start of each event.
Diamond is the regular mixed partner of Sofia Sewing on the APP Tour and ended up signing right at the time the Royals needed a better doubles fill-in for Dekel. How fortuitous! The information out there is that the Palm Beach ownership asked Grayson to say he was sick in order for them to pick up Diamond as an on-site alternate for the rest of the event – we are also very confident that this is true based on what we have heard.
Goldin was then placed on IR the next day and they have since “mutually agreed” to place him on IR for the remainder of the 2026 MLP season, which allowed Palm Beach to make the highest bid for first waiver priority and pick up Diamond on Tuesday.* How fortuitous!
We are not here to make some grand statement about MLP being taken seriously as a league when they continue changing the rules in the middle of the season or justifying exceptions as precedent to squeaky wheel ownership groups, which they appear to have done here. Not enough people are watching for any of this to matter long-term and all of this stuff ends up blowing over after time passes. However, it remains difficult to comprehend a professional sports league operating in a manner that you would not accept out of your fantasy football league with your buddies from college.
Palm Beach is an expansion team that was handed a golden opportunity with the expansion rules created specifically for them. Somehow, they screwed up their opportunity to become a real contender by choosing legacy men over new blood upside, failing to draft a singles specialist to slot-in for Tina Pisnik and drafting a local to Palm Peach singles specialist who had recently suffered a very unfortunate stroke.
It sure looks like the league wanted to do Palm Beach another solid by ensuring they could have Casey Diamond as their Dekel fill-in and rest of season bench player. MLP also turned a blind eye to the obvious roster chicanery that happened with Goldin’s “illness”.
Again, none of this will likely matter in the grand scheme of things, but we have to wonder if the upset win over the Columbus Sliders on Thursday was worth asking their lone bench player to be a team player and take a backseat? Will it be worth it to be a little bit more competitive in doubles for future events in 2026?
These are questions we do not have to answer. But when all is said and done at the end of the year, will it have all been worth it for Palm Beach?
3. The Sliders Men’s Conundrum – The Sliders are all in on 2026. Unfortunately, for a team that was attempting to position themselves to be one without any weak spots, they look about as vulnerable as they possibly could following St. Pete. Simply put, CJ Klinger and Andrei Daescu are not winning at the clip they need to be. They are 10-6 on the season, which is a fine record for most teams, but this is supposed to be an elite pairing.
In St. Pete, they lost to Staksrud/Sock (again), Clayton Powell/Dylan Frazier, got creamed by Patriquin/Tardio and snuck a close win by Navratil/Johnson on Super Sunday. After a team loss to Palm Beach where both their mixed teams lost, they were only able to secure a 5th place finish for the event.
It is not time to break the glass in case of emergency quite yet, but the men will need to figure out something fast, if the Sliders want to be real contenders come playoff time.
4. Franchise Tagging and (Almost) Trades – In more MLP mid-season rule shifting, it is looking more and more like teams are going to have the ability to franchise tag players who are reaching the end of their 3-year keeper status like JW Johnson, Anna Leigh Waters and Federico Staksrud.
This is undoubtedly having an impact on the trade deadline, which apparently may end up getting extended to July 12th, as the Dallas Flash are officially off the seller’s market. They made a surprise retooling deal to acquire Alix Truong from the Phoenix Flames. It would strongly indicate that Dallas intends to keep JW Johnson as the cornerstone of their franchise and remain competitive for 2026 with a roster of JW Johnson, Augie Ge, Danni-Elle Townsend, Alix Truong and Brooke Buckner.
The 2026 series of perplexing moves continues for the Flash. After losing Jorja, they paid $200K to get Brooke Buckner and she may be nothing more than a singles specialist for the reminder of the season. They trade Tyra Black for cash, only to use some of that cash to pick up a fine, but unspectacular, asset in Alix Truong. Townsend and JW are long-term pieces, but the roster assembled as is will not come close to a championship in 2026 or in future seasons. The Dallas Flash social media team continues to believe their franchise has bigger and better plans, but their insider credibility is gone after they teased us with the Jorja Johnson situation.
MLP added another rule after the opening Dallas event that prevents teams from carrying three top- 20 PPA players of one gender on their roster. It is apparent not everyone was aware of this shift in rules as Nico the Lefty thought he had broken a trade involving St. Louis and Chicago on Tuesday morning, only for him to be corrected that this was not possible with the change in rules. Our expectation is that the trade was probably discussed and agreed to in principle without the teams being aware of the shift in rules.
Not being aware of the rules is obviously not acceptable for these people running MLP franchises but, at this point, it is genuinely impressive how often MLP is able to make in-season rule changes.
5. LA’s Options – It was not an ideal contending weekend for LA as their flaws were exposed against St. Louis. Jim Kloss reported that they have been offered Dylan Frazier for Max Freeman and cash. We are not a fan of this move for LA as we don’t think it moves the needle enough to justify the change. It feels like a lateral move or mild upgrade in the very best-case scenario and probably depends on whether Freeman is still viewed by the organization as an asset moving forward.
Maybe you make the move for the upgrade in men’s as a win now play if you don’t care about Freeman being on the team next year, but Freeman theoretically offers more ceiling than Dylan Frazier in mixed, which may be worth more than getting the definite upgrade in men’s.
Tough spot for LA.
6. Other Waiver Notes – Outside of the Casey Diamond situation, there were a few moves that were made that are worth mentioning.
Texas dropped Matthew Barlow for Rafa Hewett and also dropped Marcela Aguila Ampon for Angie Walker. Barlow got yelled at by Lea Jansen after a recent game loss and we have to wonder if that impacted the decision to bring on Hewett. It’s unclear what this accomplishes for Texas as they lose a singles specialist, who might be best described as a hype guy, MLP specialist? Rafa has definitely performed his best in the pressure chamber of MLP. It appears to be another vibes move for the Ranchers squad.
There was some social media controversy around Travis Rettenmaier setting lineups for the Smash as an owner/player. This has always been a conflict the Smash have had to navigate, but Travis may be finally taking a step back as he was waived in favor of Connor Mogle.
The TMZ legend, Zane Ford, was picked up by Miami after executing another trade that allowed them to get some extra cash (apparently just under $100K). They moved Clayton Powell to Las Vegas as Blaine Hovenier went to Bay Area. Powell showed out better than expected and Miami capitalizes while being able to add talented guy with good singles ability. Does anyone have the numbers on how much cash Miami has recouped over the past 2 years? We’re also surprised to see the Breakers hand out cash for Blaine Hovenier.
7. MLP “New York” Preview – We have “New York” in quotes because the event last year on Randall’s Island was one of the lowest energy events and it pales in comparison to the iconic Central Park location. If wasn’t for the efforts of the involved Brooklyn ownership, it would be an even sadder event. We don’t have high expectations for a rip-roaring weekend given the teams in attendance.
Dallas is the most interesting team in NYC with their additions of Townsend and Truong. Depending on the health of Palm Beach’s men, Group B could be shaping up to be worth watching with Brooklyn as the favorite to win it. Carolina, Bay Area and Florida are the other 3 teams in Group B.
Group A should be easy sledding for New Jersey, particularly if Layne Sleeth is not healthy. Angie Walker was picked up by Texas today and that would be a tough spot for her, if she has to slot in. Chicago has two women that can hang with better players, but that’s really it in Group A. Las Vegas is likely worse without Blaine Hovenier’s energy and, if Armaan Bhatia’s ankle isn’t healthy enough, SoCal is very uninteresting.
There could be an excessive number of laughers this coming week.
*this article has been updated to correct that Palm Beach paid to get number 1 waiver priority to pick up Casey Diamond.
