Why Doesn’t Major League Pickleball (MLP) Care About Its Own Draft?
It’s a simple question. Why doesn’t MLP care about its own draft?
That may be an oversimplification of the situation, but it is abundantly clear that MLP has chosen not to allocate much in the way resources to bring eyeballs to its draft process.
This isn’t anything new, unfortunately, and it is not a regime specific complaint by any means. We went back to our old MLP draft content and were reminded that this is something we have been consistently critical of, except for the very first draft in 2021. See these excerpts below:
Fast forward to 2026. Setting aside the complexities of MLP’s ever changing rules structure (that’s a conversation for another day), objectively, it was another year of limited output of content and advertising that MLP put forth leading up to the draft.
The offseason content put out by MLP, particularly between the keeper deadline and the draft itself, was bare bones and minimalist. It focused on the more basic, fly over the forest analysis that would be necessary for casual fans dropping into MLP without much background. Necessary content, indeed. However, there is so much meat on the bone in terms of draft content, and we remain baffled by the ongoing lack of effort that MLP has put toward its draft coverage.
We went to Pickleball.com on Thursday and noticed they advertised there would be live reporting draft picks on their socials, which was the first we saw of anything being advertised of live reporting in the lead up to the draft. Until the day before the draft, there was only going to be a draft reveal show on Sunday, at 12pm EST, two days after the draft.
Suddenly, on Thursday evening (the night before the draft), MLP posted on its socials that there would be a live draft show with Will Daughton and Dave Fleming. It sure appeared that, for whatever reason, MLP decided the day before the draft (or maybe 2 days before) they would pivot to doing a draft show. Something they had months to plan and prepare for, and should have been preparing for well in advance of the draft.
In 2024, MLP implemented the most unique draft process in all of sports. The dynamic bidding process is very fantasy football-esque with the auction style format. It has the potential to be most entertaining draft product in all of sports yet all we have gotten in terms of draft day content the last 3 years is a partial live draft show and live-ish updates on MLP’s website (2024), opening up the draft room to media members who live blogged or had a YouTube live show (2025) and a haphazardly put together live draft show featuring smoke behind Dave Fleming for the first 5 or 10 minutes (2026).
The NFL began airing content around the combine in 2004 and has continually expanded on that coverage. The NFL draft has become a machine from a content standpoint for the NFL itself, networks and talking heads alike. While other more mainstream team sports have drafts of their own, the NFL stands far above the rest with how deeply people care about the draft throughout the entire calendar year. It has become an event in and of itself, in part because the NFL made a concerted effort to bring draft content to their audience. There are a multitude of reasons why that has not happened for other sports in the same way, but the NFL should be a model that all pro leagues aspire to.
Although resources are likely limited to some degree for the UPA given the financial constraints of the organization these days, there doesn’t seem to be any sweat or energy being put in to even try to make the draft a thing. There are so many amazing storylines that have come from the offseason, the keeper deadline and the number of new players in the mix as players eligible to be drafted. None of these stories are being told by MLP.
There was almost no l analysis provided about the massive player pool in the lead up to the draft. They don’t any podcasts or consistent YouTube content affiliated with the league that go beyond the surface level rules and discussion. There is only the bare minimum being provided to the public on social media about what is going on. Heck, there wasn’t m even a publicly available list of draft eligible players released by the league.
You can blame resources for the lack of content and analysis, but it is the year of 2026. It should not be that hard for the league to figure out how to integrate a live draft show with their fantasy football draft software to show the dynamic bidding process. A major complaint in the live chat of the YouTube stream was the inability to see the chaotic and exciting bidding process. Instead, we had to listen to Dave and Will do their best to fill the 25 minutes of air time with periodic updates about where things stood.
One of our non-pickleball playing friends who only follows MLP because of our obsession and involvement with the sport, texted us the above messages the day after the draft. It’s so interesting to us that a person with only a limited understanding of pickle can get so into the draft. It’s equally as interesting that this friend of ours highlights the ineptitude of MLP’s draft coverage in a couple of texts and how much more they can do to bring fans in.
It took the PPA 2 days to fire up a pickleball red zone of sorts for the Mesa event after the idea was suggested by Nico the Lefty. They are live streaming literally every court on a separate PPA Streamed Courts YouTube channel. The PPA has also integrated player matches on the player profiles of its athletes on their website.
The technology and know how have to be there. For whatever reason, they are actively choosing not to do simple things that would make their draft coverage so much better.
Maybe MLP feels the draft content isn’t worthwhile and this comes down to a difference of opinion. If that is the case, in our view, it misses the mark that MLP has the ability to carve out its own path in the world of sports that could captivate a currently untapped audience. People may be uncertain on pickleball viewing but draft content is tried and tested as something that people want. While we are seeing the rise in team-based formats for less mainstream, individual sports such as TGL (golf), PPL (padel) and Major League Table Tennis (ping pong), MLP has a great product that gets fans excited and has offseason content that is as interesting as any other sport for those who care.
This year’s live draft coverage without any advertising generated a consistent 2,000 plus live stream views on YouTube. Not a large number, but an encouraging one for a broadcast that received next to no advertising in a horrendous 10am EST Friday morning time slot. By the way, as of the publishing of this post (approx. 12:30pm EST on Monday, March 2nd), MLP’s YouTube page has not posted its MLP Draft recap show that aired on Sunday.
The MLP draft is niche content within the already niche content of pro pickleball. There isn’t a widespread audience right now for the product but the people that care, care deeply about the product. Recognizing that we have been in a bubble of a small handful of individuals over the past 6 years who consistently devote time and attention to the MLP draft, the fact is that there is a larger audience of people who find themselves in the same boat for other professional sports. It should not be a reach to extrapolate that a far bigger audience could be pulled into professional pickleball draft content machine, should one ever be created.
Conspiracy NML might float the idea that this is another notch on the belt of the UPA treating MLP as its red-headed step-child. An ongoing trend of lesser care and attention of the grass on MLP’s side of the lawn where key investors of the UPA appear to be tired of the siphoning money on teams that don’t generate revenue and where there is no clear path to more rapid revenue generation in the near future from the product.
But that might be considered hare-brained conspiracy theorist type of thinking that isn’t entirely reasonable with only circumstantial evidence at best to support such conclusions. Conspiracy NML would also be ignoring that this isn’t an issue that is exclusive to the new UPA regime and has plagued MLP since they made their first draft a big-time, YouTube live streamed event.
Regardless of the reasons for the lack of attention given to its own draft by MLP, it strikes us mostly as deflating. Deflating as two people who care deeply about a sport we want to see succeed and grow. Deflating because we have found MLP to be some of the most compelling sports content we have experienced in our entire lives and the powers that be don’t seem to see it the same way. Deflating because there should be more draft content out there in our year of 2026, yet there is not.
We love the MLP draft and all its weird iterations over the years. It’s by far our favorite type of content to put out.
But alas, another year has passed by without MLP featuring the draft as a key part of its product. It means another year shouting to the heavens, to anyone who will listen, not only that something should change. Rather, something needs to change.
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
