Where NML Was Right and Where NML Was Wrong – 2026 MLP Edition
There’s a lot of takes that get thrown around during the course of a professional sports season. Some are right and some are wrong. That’s part of the fun. People love to call out when they are right but not so much when they are wrong. Conversely, critics love to point out when you are wrong but happily ignore the times you may have been right.
We have done this exercise before because we enjoy seeing how our takes netted out over the course of a year, so let’s do it again. This is another edition of where NML was right and where NML was wrong – 2026 MLP edition.
Right and Wrong: Elsie Hendershot
In our 2025 Winners and Losers column posted in January, we flagged Elsie Hendershot as “pro pickle’s most intriguing case study” and that we were “very high on Hendershot as a 3-year keeper for an MLP team”. Her tools and athleticism stood out to us as a 13-year-old that did not appear to be ahead of the curve in terms of physical development.
It is obvious, in hindsight, that it was a gigantic miss for all 20 teams to pass on Hendershot in the starter portion of the 2026 free agency draft. Why we feel we were both right and wrong on Hendershot, is that before the draft we had kind of gone one foot in and one foot out on Hendershot’s potential. We slotted her in at #13 on our female draft big board behind the likes of Kiora Kunimoto, Cailyn Campbell, Isabella Dunlap and Sahra Dennehy. We were concerned about her iffy 2026 results but still believed “it is better to take a chance on [Hendershot] for a team that won’t be in contention anyway.”
Every team in the draft could have had Elsie Hendershot, but why not put together a team with two upside females instead of one? There was also Cailyn Campbell or Kiora Kunimoto out there. They spent more on Jalina Ingram than the Shock did on Elsie Hendershot. What is the long-term goal here?
NML on the Chicago Slice – March 12, 2026
In our post-draft grades, we expressed confusion that the Chicago Slice spent more on Jalina Ingram than the Shock did on Elsie Hendershot and highlighted that the Bouncers should have been looking at Elsie Hendershot “as the best viable option to create a contending team without breaking the bank in MLP”.
Not that it matters since we don’t get paid to run a team, but we are still kicking ourselves that we backed off our initial assessment of Hendershot because of some spotty early results with in her first foray on the PPA Tour. It’s a lesson that sometimes you need to trust your instincts over the results, especially when those results involve below average partners, for the most part.
Our big boards for the blog are more of a general overview rather than team specific, and we’d like to think if we were in the shoes of non-contending team, Elsie would have been much higher on the board for us given our love of upside. However, it is clear after a full season of MLP that Elsie should been the top player on our women’s board outside of the top 3 – Anna Bright, Jorja Johnson and Danni-Elle Townsend.
For any team that wasn’t a title contender in 2026, they should be sick to their stomachs that they didn’t either draft Hendershot or right their wrong the way that the Slice did and pay for the privilege of securing her on the roster for the coming years.
This should serve as a reminder to lower spending teams that swinging on upside rather than on semi-proven or already capped out talent is worth the gamble. We don’t have Kelly Goodnow in the same tier of Hendershot from a prospect profile, but she is the exact profile of the player that should be on an MLP roster rather than your Lina Padegimaite’s or Allison Phillips’s of the world.
Wrong: Balance Being Restored
After the first week of the MLP season, we wrote in our takeaways about how it felt like balance was restored to a certain degree in MLP. At that time, it felt like there was going to be more competitiveness from some of the middle-class teams because of the greater investment that more teams were putting into the draft.
Unfortunately, the talent disparity and incentives of the league meant that the balance would slowly shift away from being restored as the season went along. Part of that was due to organic gaps in talent discrepancy and another part of that was due to so many teams selling off their better talent to contending teams.
By the end of the season, Miami traded its whole roster, but most importantly moved Nico Acevedo to Texas for $400K. Tyra Black was traded from Dallas to Columbus in a retooling effort. Federico Staksrud went from Orlando to the 5’s. The LA Mad Drops took on Connor Garnett from Utah. The Atlanta Bouncers got Mari Humberg. California took on Zoey Weil, Dylan Frazier and Pablo Tellez.
Other than Tom Dundon and Carolina, we don’t blame these teams for selling off their talent to the highest bidder. The incentives are not there to push the envelope to fall short of a title and it led to another season of lopsided, unbalanced competition.
Right: Danni-Elle Townsend
Townsend has been a shining beacon for the MLP season. She fit the perfect mold of fresh talent thriving under the spotlight of MLP against the best players in the sport. We had Townsend at #3 on our women’s big board coming into the season, only behind Anna Bright and Jorja Johnson. After week 1, one of us proclaimed that Townsend will be “a top 3 female in the sport one year from now”.
It doesn’t feel like there is any reason to move off that take seeing what Townsend has been able to do for what we once viewed as a reeling Dallas Flash organization. Townsend’s energy and charisma are built for MLP, and she has the game to back it up.
Can she be better than everyone other than ALW and Anna Bright in less than a year? TBD.
Wrong: Nico Acevedo
We should have known better than to doubt Johnny Goldberg’s home run cuts in the draft. We gave Miami a C draft grade because we knew that Acevedo had been on the radar for Goldberg in the 2024 Challenger draft and the team decided to go in a different direction. Acevedo hadn’t done much in the sport for a couple of years after that, so we had wondered whether this was finally a reach from Goldberg and Miami to take Acevedo in a starter slot.
Acevedo was on the radar for Miami’s Challenger draft back in 2024, but it Miami chose to go in a different direction. It’s hard to question Johnny Goldberg’s talent identification, but there’s nothing over the past 2 years to suggest Acevedo is worth a roster spot in MLP, much less a starting spot.
NML on the Miami Pickleball Club – March 12, 2026
Evidently, that was an incorrect deduction on our part. We have since learned that Acevedo had finally decided to bet on himself as a full-time pro and it led to him being the most exciting breakout male talent in MLP this year.
Big win for Miami and Goldberg, even if they ended up trading Acevedo away.
Right and Wrong: Palm Beach Royals
The reason why we are giving ourselves a push on the Royals is because of how good their women were in 2026. We were on board with the pre-draft moves for Tina Pisnik and Sofia Sewing, but we questioned the fit of two primary left-side players. We expected them to be solid together. We did not expect that the pair would go undefeated until the final event of the regular season.
Where we were definitely right on this Royals squad was that they “fumbled the bag” by pairing Tyson McGuffin with Dekel Bar. They could have had any of Jonathan Truong, Tama Shimabukuro or Arman Bhatia as high upside men to pair with Dekel, yet they went with the mid-30’s declining most electrifying man in sports.
Setting aside our regret for putting Jonathan Truong ahead of Tama Shimabukuro on our 2026 men’s big board, the process of the Royals decision to go with Tyson was just really, really bad. You put a rising male talent on this team (not Casey Diamond) and suddenly you have the makings of a frisky outside-ish type contender in line with Brooklyn or Dalas.
Instead, the Royals were left with a women’s team that is being brought down by its men and the lack of a proper singles specialist for Tina Pisnik.
Palm Beach ended up about exactly where we thought they would, except that their women were awesome rather than simply solid or good and the stink of the way they handled the Grayson Goldin situation remains stinky.
Wrong: Las Vegas and Utah
We hit on 10 or the 12 playoff teams in our pre-season power rankings. We had Orlando and Utah in the playoffs with Las Vegas and SoCal out. Orlando’s volatility was built into the equation, and SoCal was flagged as one of the most interesting teams in the league at #13. However, Las Vegas and Utah are two teams that we missed quite badly on.
Heading into the season, the addition of Tama Shimabukuro was a mismatch fit with Garnett but it was still an intriguing upgrade around a roster of solid veterans. Utah never put it together as they went 8-18 with a 1-4 Dreambreaker record, not good on either front. Etta Tuionteoa’s days as a higher end MLP player appear to be done and your ceiling as a team is going to be capped with Allyce Jones as a starter.
Hopefully Utah decides to revamp going into 2027 as it would be such a shame to waste Tama’s talent on a roster with no chance of contending. The upside of the MLP format for new talent is what we have seen from Danni-Elle Townsend and Elsie Hendershot. The downside is the situation Tama found himself in, being stuck in purgatory on a sub-par roster.
Las Vegas, on the other hand, exceeded our expectations, even if their record was 11-17 overall. What we underestimated about Las Vegas was that the baseline level from their women was better than other middle and lower class teams, and they were always bringing the fight to their matchups. It probably helps having a veteran never say die coach like Steve Deakin on the bench to keep things together over the course of a season.
Our view is that Dallas made the right decision to play Las Vegas, even if their Dreambreaker lineup is a little bit scary. They shouldn’t have the doubles prowess to hang with Dallas. Nevertheless, it is a big win for this roster that they found their way into one of those top-12 playoff spots.
Right: Top Teams
This is not anything we are proud of since everyone knew who the top teams would be in 2026. We are still going to point out that everyone and their mother had either the Shock or 5’s in the 1-2 slots, and we felt there was a clear top 4 with the Mad Drops ending up ahead of the Sliders (we had the Sliders at #3 in the preseason).
There were some people with Brooklyn in the top 4 and we’ll never know if that would be wrong or right given their injury situation. What we do know is that there were no surprise teams to crash the party of the established contenders.
Wrong: Dallas and California Going Sell Mode
We were convinced after Dallas traded Tyra Black for Danni-Elle Townsend that they would be going into full retool mode and JW Johnson would not be on the roster much longer. We were also convinced when California traded Kiora Kuniomoto and got cash and Pablo Tellez in return, that they had thrown in the towel for the 2026 season. We were dead wrong on both fronts.
Dallas zigged when everyone else thought they would zag. They brought in Alix Truong to play women’s with Townsend and kept Brooke Buckner in the mixed lineup with JW Johnson. It led to two event wins for Dallas as they have rallied together as a group with a chip on their shoulder. There has been a freedom to the energy of Dallas since the trade of Tyra. JW has new life and the roster is playing with unbridled enthusiasm.
The Dallas players have nothing to lose, and it has shown with their on-court performance. They enter the playoffs as the #6 seed and will play the Las Vegas Night Owls. They have a bit of that Columbus Sliders 2025 aura to them right now.
California owner, Ritchie Tuazon, was adamant that the team traded Kunimoto because they wanted to make the playoffs in 2026. We didn’t believe him. They proceeded to acquire Zoey Weil and Dylan Frazier and were one win (or Chicago loss) away from being a frisky first round playoff team.
While we were wrong about Dallas and California, can you really blame us? It’s hard for us to understand the logic of either team making the decision to go for the gusto in 2026. Although it is commendable that neither team waved the white flag, both teams were in a position to focus on 2027 and instead chose the path of no contention with no expectation of a championship in 2026.
As much as Dallas feels like a team of destiny, we really don’t think they have any chance to win a title this year. JW can only take the roster so far. The only thing is that if Dallas can keep JW going into 2027, he and Townsend are a legitimate foundation to a championship level roster. Stay relevant in 2026 and find a way to contend in 2027 makes some sense, especially if Noe Khlif was the piece that you get to build your team on moving forward.
California brought back two former familiar faces in Dylan Frazier (2023 season 1 California member) and Pablo Tellez (2023 season 1 Bay Area member, iykyk). We’re not sure what making the playoffs would have accomplished for the Bears in 2026 as we don’t think either Tellez or Frazier are pieces on a title contending team, even if they both significantly raise the level of the team. We do see the logic of bringing in Weil to pair with Dennehy, as that at least forms some basis for a reasonable foundation in 2027. Dennehy and Weil played well together, even if we’re still not sold that those two will form anything other more than a middle to slightly above middle class women’s team going forward.
Interesting approaches to team building for both franchises. We’ll have to see where it all nets out in the off-season.
Right: The 5’s Needed a Men’s Upgrade
It was apparent from last year that the men of the 5’s warranted an upgrade. After they acquired Jorja Johnson, there wasn’t an immediate need to see if change was needed because of such a substantial upgrade to their #2 female spot. After flip flopping their men’s sides and moving Howells away from the ALW mixed partnership, the 5’s traded for Federico Staksrud and appear to have settled on Noe Khlif with ALW and Fed with Jorja as their mixed teams.
The men’s doubles situation is still up for debate, but Noe Khlif has really settled in as the guy seeing all the balls in the ALW/Noe partnership. As much as a brain bender as it must be for Noe to be seeing the vast majority of balls in mixed, he has now had a bunch of time to get accustomed to the strategy and is fully ready to grind. We can’t help but wonder if the strategy has gone too far from the Shock and the Mad Drops. The Shock barely played any balls to ALW’s forehand, and it felt like there were plenty of dead ball opportunities for the Shock to put together balls behind ALW to open up the court a bit more.
Alas, these teams and players have spent far more time analyzing that matchup than we have, so this is merely an observation and we are curious whether a few more balls go cross-court to ALW in an effort to open up the court a little more and make things less predictable for Noe. If there is any non-top player built to handle grinding out rallies in mixed, it has to be Noe Khlif. He’s going to give very few misses and you are going to have to work for almost everything you get.
At this point, we all want to see a Shock versus 5’s final after the 15-13 epic mixed battle that we witnessed in Orlando.
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
