Lopsided Ben Johns Trade Leads to Big Questions Surrounding Competitive Integrity of MLP

It’s being billed as the biggest trade in pickleball history, but it should represent something far different in the early history of Major League Pickleball.

On Saturday, it was announced that the No. 1 player in the world, Ben Johns, was traded to the LA Mad Drops. The Carolina Hogs traded Johns along with Etta Tuionetoa in exchange for Brandon French, Danna Funaro, and cash. The MLP Competition Structure for 2025 states that the maximum amount of compensation that can be exchanged “per trade” is $200,000, so we can safely assume it was $200K that went back to Carolina.

Etta Tuionetoa was then flipped to the Utah Black Diamonds in exchange for Mehvish Safdar and cash.

If we didn’t have the Luka Dončić for Anthony Davis trade earlier this year, this might be the most lopsided trade in professional sports history and it is an embarrassment to the league for a multitude of reasons.

We detailed our concerns with the Carolina Hogs and the state of the league following the Ben Johns lighting debacle at MLP Columbus. It started with the post-merger 2024 draft and Tom Dundon’s need to ensure Ben Johns was on his team, while seemingly tanking the rest of the draft by not spending the maximum amount of money available. It led to a mopey Ben on a flawed Carolina roster that did not make the playoffs in 2024.

Moving into 2025, once again, Tom Dundon chose not to spend money in the draft to give Ben Johns a chance to win. Dundon, an individual who should have a vested interest in MLP’s success, continued to sabotage any chance his prized possession had by refusing to spend in the 2025 free agency draft.

2025 became an even sadder year for Ben Johns as Carolina sat in last place in the standings for a stretch of time. Dundon spent a little money to bring Etta Tuionetoa over from the Texas Ranchers in exchange for Kaitlyn Christian. It was a mildly encouraging sign and had us wondering if there was behind-the-scenes lobbying for Dundon to finally invest a little bit of effort into the MLP side of the business.

That mild encouragement was short-lived, as the Hogs proceeded to give Ben Johns away for a bag of chips and some pogs.

Beyond the clear lack of effort by Tom Dundon, several other questionable factors make the entire exchange of players and cash feel unsettling.

Let’s start with the Quang Duong’s UPA contract termination, which left the Mad Drops starting at another lost season due to circumstances beyond their control. From an optics perspective, it looks far too convenient that the UPA terminated Duong’s contract and that the team benefiting is run by one of the most important stakeholders in the UPA governance structure.

It must also be noted that the trade deadline was pushed back from Wednesday, July 16th to Monday, July 21, following the league’s announcement that the Challenger Division would remain in 2026 and only the winner of Challenger would be promoted to Premier. Without the extension of the trade deadline, the Ben Johns deal would not have happened.

Then comes the second part of the trade. Conveniently, the CEO of the UPA, former Commissioner of the PPA and close business partner of Tom Dundon, is a big-time beneficiary. Not only did the Mad Drops get Ben Johns, but they also received cash back from the Utah Black Diamonds to subsidize the deal. That cash allowed Utah to acquire a top local player to promote their Utah-based pickleball team.

This isn’t like other sports where tanking is semi-acceptable. In other major professional leagues, tanking and trading away players before they demand big money is a means to an end. Yes, Major League Baseball has teams like the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays that work around limited budgets, but even they are trying to be savvy to assemble competitive rosters, something currently unavailable in pickleball. Unlike in MLP, other pro sports also need to get butts in their home seats to make money.

European soccer is a prime example of “have” and “have-not” teams investing in top talent. But again, those teams strive to compete, grow talent, and improve. None of that applies to Tom Dundon and the Carolina Hogs.

The Hogs could have easily gotten more value for Ben Johns. Ben is worth as much as anyone in pro pickleball and all they got was cash.

Imagine the Commissioner of your fantasy football league allowing/facilitating this scenario. Extend the trade deadline. Let one team that has been screwed by uncontrollable circumstances make a deal with a team out of playoff contention for the best player in the league in exchange for next to nothing. Then, the buddy of the guy who traded away his best players gets to secondary benefit from the fire sale.

You’d be yelling “COLLUSION!”

That is what it appears the owner of the St. Louis Shock, Ross Chaifetz, did on X Sunday morning, in a now deleted posting that read: “Let’s call this trade what it is. Orchestrated collusion.”

Chaifetz later clarified the post, but that felt more like appeasement for others in the league who likely expressed displeasure at one of MLP’s most invested owners calling out the situation for what it is.

I owe clarity on an earlier tweet. My message was meant to express frustration around the timeline, rules, and process by which teams acquired certain players, not the league itself or certain individuals.

I take pride in being one of the most passionate stakeholders in the…

— Ross Chaifetz (@RossChaifetz) July 20, 2025

Despite heavy criticism of the situation, we recognize most people won’t remember this. MLP is still a start-up organization with growing pains and this likely isn’t the first time this type of thing has happened in the early years of a professional sports league. We’ll keep watching MLP, curious to see how the Ben Johns trade plays out with the Mad Drops. But we aren’t the people that matter. This leaves a sour taste for the casual and hardcore fans you’re trying to win over as a long-term fan base.

How can you expect fans to invest in a product where a critical league owner gives away the best player in the world for cash that almost certainly won’t be reinvested in the league?

As we alluded to above and the 5’s X account pointed out, it comes across as a “make good” for the Quang Duong situation, which is crazy in itself.

Well that’s not true. We completed our deal prior to the deadline. The deadline was extended for this other trade to get done. If the Hog’s really wanted the cash and got enough of it, then so be it. But it feels like a make good for the QD situation which is odd.

— @The5sPickleball (@the5spickleball) July 20, 2025

A trade like this upends the league’s competitive integrity. It’s painfully unfair to franchises doing everything in their power to build MLP into a thriving venture. Teams like the Shock, Flash, 5’s, Sliders, and Brooklyn aren’t shy about spending on their rosters and communities to establish real professional foundations.

Instead, in the blink of an eye, an invested team goes from long-shot contender pre-Quang termination to arguable favorites, all because one of UPA’s top stakeholders doesn’t care about MLP’s success or failure. Dundon once sought to bury the team-based format. Now, post-merger necessity has him holding a stake in a product he clearly has no interest investing in.

The care Dundon has shown his MLP team mirrors the UPA’s broader league investment. Actively placing Ben in an environment designed to bring out the worst in him is Exhibit A. It is part of what has led previously engaged owners to more or less check out.

While the lack of investment and direction from another UPA Board-owned team, the New York Hustlers, is bad for competitive balance and MLP optics, the Carolina Hogs giving away the league’s best player for peanuts is worse.

In a vacuum, it’s not that the trade happened. It’s everything surrounding it that makes it bad and potentially nefarious.

To summarize:

1. The trade deadline was pushed back to give teams time to adjust to the Premier/Challenger format change for 2026.
2. Key UPA stakeholder, Tom Dundon, traded the world’s top male player to the LA Mad Drops, who had just lost Quang Duong due to a UPA contract termination.
3. Connor Pardoe, CEO of the UPA), benefitted from Dundon’s firesale by acquiring Etta Tuionetoa from the Mad Drops.
4. The Mad Drops are suddenly as, or, at least, serious contenders, to win it all.

It should also be noted that Dundon completed his fire sale by trading Roscoe Bellamy to the Dallas Flash for cash on Sunday as well as Martin and Tammy Emmrich to Miami for cash on Monday. As if we needed any more evidence to conclude that Dundon is checked out on MLP, not that he ever checked in.

This isn’t a normal set of circumstances in the MLP. This isn’t just a cash-focused owner pocketing money at the expense of competitive integrity.

Maybe it won’t matter five years from now, if the league grows and thrives. But just like the Ben Johns eye-gate fiasco, this is another glaring sign that key stakeholders continue to operate contrary to the league’s best interests and suppress what, in our opinion, is the better format to grow pro pickleball.

Yes, it’s great that Ben Johns is finally on a winning team again, but it shouldn’t have happened like this. Not in a way that disrespects and destabilizes the league’s competitive core.

Agree or disagree? Let us know in the comments or email us at nmlpickleball@gmail.com! You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @nmlpickleball

 

 

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