Winners and Losers of the 2026 MLP Draft
We’re going to do our usual draft grades column at some point, but we want to see how all the trades shake out before handing those out all willy nilly without full context. Instead, we’ll do a winners and losers column first and then we’ll have draft grades column out for the 20 teams, once the trades are announced.
Winner: MLP Coffers
$3.64 million. That’s the total amount of money that teams spent to fill out starting roster spots in 2026. The primary reason the league created this auction style format was to assist with putting money into the bank after Tour Wars. Although the auction system has created a league that lacked parity in 2025, the positive intended effect of the auction was in full force on Friday.
The St. Louis Shock and New Jersey 5’s were in a 3-way bidding war with the Columbus Sliders for the first pick. The Sliders dropped out at around the $700K mark and the other very wealthy owners kept going until the Shock secured the pick for $1.23 million big ones.
The second pick went to the 5’s for $800K as they outbid the Flash. The numbers went down significantly after that, but teams continued to spend in the low six figures, which means MLP is going to be getting a lot of money for this year and going forward. Players drafted in 2026 can be kept for 3 years at their full auction price, which means the league will keep recouping money from teams at those big price tags.
While it seems like a lot of money to spend a pickleball draft, it is a drop in the bucket for a family like the Chaifetz’s, who are flying their players around in private jets on the regular. Keep that in mind once the sticker shock of those auction prices wears off.
Say what you want about all the negative consequences that unlimited spending sprees create for MLP competition, and we have said a lot in the past, but MLP is getting exactly what it wants out of this process.
Loser: Flash Mob
At least, it would appear the Flash mob are big losers. They questionably decided to drop Jorja Johnson, for reasons we still do not fully understand. They were right in the mix for the #2 pick in the auction and lost out to the 5’s. Then, they proceeded not to bid for any of the other top female talent and end up with Callie Smith for $35K. Unless the social media team knows something that we don’t, this team does not appear as if it will contend.
We see two options for the team that has essentially been run by Julie Johnson. One, they sell their team as backup plan that was already in place if they couldn’t get Jorja for the right price. The second option is they are going to find a way to trade for a second female. The difficulty is the rules allow for only $200K to exchange hands for a single player.
We’ll have to wait and see.
Winner: People Demanding Live Draft Coverage
MLP’s lack of attention to its own draft coverage deserves its own separate post, and it may very well get one from us. For the time being, we couldn’t understand in the lead up to the draft why the only thing that had been advertised in any fashion was a draft reveal show on Sunday, two days after the draft.
Whether it was external or internal pressure, MLP announced they were going to do a live draft show on Thursday evening, the night before the draft was set to take place. Incomprehensible, really.
MLP has the most unique draft process in all of sports and they couldn’t decide on whether to do a live draft show until the day before the draft took place. They clearly weren’t thinking about maximizing viewership by scheduling it at 10am EST on Friday morning.
In spite of all that, the live stream on YouTube averaged around 2,000 viewers for most of the broadcast. There were over 1,000 people waiting for the draft to start at 10am EST. Some pickleball hater thought it was an insult to say there were maybe 1,000 people who would watch a pickleball draft and we responded that 1,000 would be a really good number!
Without any advertising, averaging 2,000 people on a live stream is a very good number from our perspective.
While the production quality of the draft show itself was very Mickey Mouse and there were inevitably complaints in the poppin’ off, old school live chat that we could not see the bidding process, beggers cannot be choosers. At least there was a live show, which served as another reminder to us that YouTube streaming and keeping the live chat open is the way to go to bring fan engagement.
What it also tells us is that there is clearly a market for draft coverage and MLP should be doing a way better job trying to leverage that to drive fan interest going forward.
Winner: Clown Town
No matter what happens here with the 5’s roster, they are the big winners of the draft. They still haven’t made an official welcome post on social media for Jorja Johnson, which they did right away for their bench players Martin Emmrich and Lina Padegimaite. Who knows if that means anything?
Unfortunately for the rest of the league, somehow, the 5’s find a way to be the most annoying franchise in MLP even during the draft. Whether it was intel gathered or a savvy sixth sense that multiple top women would be available, New Jersey made a really good bet that they might be able to find an upgrade for Meghan Dizon to push their roster closer to championship contention. They proceeded to drive the price up on the St. Louis Shock on a bid they had to know they never were going to win and then steal Jorja Johnson from the Dallas Flash at a cool price of $800,000.
We still feel like there is more to come transaction-wise from this new Jersey team, but they are the biggest winners of the offseason so far.
One other thing we want to add is that it probably isn’t as clear cut as many people think it is that dropping AB and Jorja was as big a mistake as it was. It sure looks like a mistake, but if both teams dropped men, it is always possible that there would have been a similar bidding war for JW and Gabe or Hayden. Al Tylis and Brooklyn is a big spending team and, for all we know, the 5’s had good intel that their competitors were dropping women. If it vice versa, maybe they also drop a guy and it’s another 3-way bidding war between St. Louis, New Jersey and Brooklyn.
Loser: Deep Dish Pizza
We still don’t know what Chicago is doing. They acquired Hunter Johnson and Zane Navratil in the offseason, which is an average men’s doubles team. We really liked their upside swing early in the draft by taking Jamie Wei, who we had as the #6 female on our big board. Confusingly, they won the bid for the next pick after Wei and selected Mari Humberg. In a vacuum, Mari is not a bad pick but it makes no sense to pair her with Jamie Wei.
Wei’s got power and hands, and has been playing on the left with Allyce Jones on Tour. Our concerns with Wei are whether she has the soft hands and feel to be a top end player. Nevertheless, Mari has to play the left and wants to play the left in mixed as well. The fit doesn’t make a lot of sense and what this roster gets you would appear to be a middle of the pack group, at best.
We like the selections of Jalina Ingram and Tom Protzek for the bench spots, and wonder if Protzek may end up starting in men’s over Zane at some point. Still, this looks like another year of the Slice spending more than an insignificant amount of money on a roster that will be disappointing at worst and slightly above average at best.
Winner: Australian Pickleball
Danni-Elle Townsend, the #3 player on our women’s big board, ended up being selected with the #3 pick for $180,000 to the Columbus Sliders. The Sliders had an all-time run in the 2025 playoffs but a ton of drama in the lead up to the playoffs surrounded this team in spite of their success. Instead of running it back, they clearly had Townsend as a target and chose to be aggressive to acquire her.
With the 22nd pick, the Texas Ranchers selected Sahra Dennehy, which is really a selection for the California Black Bears due to a trade that was announced in the 1st trade window, but couldn’t be executed until the post-draft trade window. Dennehy will go to California and Layne Sleeth will be with Texas.
This means there will likely be two recently signed UPA Australians starting on MLP teams this year. Australia has been a low key hotbed for pickleball with multiple professional leagues, including branches of PPA and MLP, and a good amount of talent showing they can compete at the top level.
Winner: State of California
We were initially confused to see SoCal spend $85K on Meghan Dizon and wondered what they were up to. The Hard Eights ended up securing 3 of the next 5 picks after Dizon to bring Cailyn Campbell back into the fold, add Aramman Bhatia (who fell too far in the draft) and select youngster, Will MacKinnon, as its 2nd male. We preferred Kiora Kuniomoto to Campbell, but you can’t blame the Hard Eights for going with what they know.
We really like the idea of bringing on veteran talent to help balance out the youthful upside. Although Bhatia is newer on the scene, he is an adult and it probably isn’t optimal to have 3 or 4 teenagers on a roster. Instead, SoCal has 2 adults and 2 teenagers, and a lot of upside. There is hope for them to build for the future after the spent next to nothing the last two seasons.
California also had a nice little draft. With new GM, Erik Tice, driving the bus, they were fortunate to have Kiora Kunimoto there at the #15 spot. We had her at #8 on our women’s board, but that really should have been higher. When the not very athletic teenagers are able to get way better at pickleball, the sky is the limit for the athletic ones. Kunimoto is an athlete from what we have seen.
They didn’t really spend money on the rest of their draft, but they brought on Chris Haworth, who will turn this team into a singles juggernaut (Kunimoto, Dennehy, Haworth, Loyd), brought back Michael Loyd at a lower cost, swung for upside on Emma Nelson and must have liked Challenger alum, Anouar Braham. We haven’t spent the time to really dig in on the Challenger alum group, including Braham, so we’ll see how the talent identification is for Tice and this California front office.
Bay Area had an interesting draft too. They scooped up Len Yang and Ella Yeh for their starting spots, along with Genie Erokhina and Luc Pham. Erokhina can start while Yeh develops and Len Yang is starter ready with Luc Pham a development option and singles specialist ready. There’s some decent upside in the mix.
The California teams were very disappointing in 2025, but 2026 may be the start of a new chapter.
Loser: AJ Koller
What the hell is going on here? We don’t think AJ Koller should have been a starter, but this will be another year with Koller at the top of the notable undrafted list. We felt like AJ Koller was a better choice than Martin Emmrich as a doubles back-up on a title contending team with a strong singles roster.
Koller isn’t always the most focused guy and that may keep him off of team rosters permanently, but he’s too good not to have landed somewhere.
Or maybe he’s a winner. He gets paid the same regardless.
Winner: Upside Value
We put together big boards that were heavily focused on upside and youth, but those players still didn’t go quite as high as they could have. It meant that a bunch of teams got big time upside at a relatively discounted value – Utah (Tama Shimabukuro #10), Phoenix (Jonathan Troung at #11 and Cam Chaffin at #16), SoCal (Cailyn Campbell at #13, Armaan Bhatia at #14 and Will MacKinnon at #17), California (Kiora Kunimoto at #15), St. Louis (John Lucian Goins at #29 and Elsie Hendershot at #30) and Carolina (Isabella Dunlap at #66).
We’ll see where things shake out after the trade window, but we don’t really understand what drafting players like Tyson McGuffin and Callie Smith do for your franchise in 2026. There was upside all around the draft and some other intriguing names were taken in the bench portion of the draft, but we really felt like teams that went the upside route were big winners, especially considering the relative value.
Winner: Franchise Investment in MLP
After a year with terrible parity issues and sad sack franchises, it was super encouraging to see so many teams continuing to show investment in the league. With the consolidation of Premier and Challenger, the addition of the Palm Beach Royals and so much new talent under the UPA umbrella, it appears that most teams are still looking to build competitive franchises.
It has been a given that the big dogs like St. Louis and New Jersey will spend money, but it is a positive to see their ongoing hefty financial commitments to being title contenders. Columbus was bidding upwards of $675K and ended up with the #3 pick for $180K. The Flash tried to bring Jorja Johnson back.
Beyond the aforementioned California teams showing some promise, the Phoenix Flames (youth), Orlando Squeeze (Jack Sock) and Texas Ranchers/Chicago Slice/Atlanta Bouncers (who the hell knows what they are doing) are trying to chart a new path to relevancy.
You always know that Al Tylis and Brooklyn are looking to make some noise. Palm Beach is doing its best to be relevant. The LA Mad Drops are obviously trying to make a run.
Even the previously cash hungry Connor Pardoe shelled out $125,000 for Utah to lock-up the #2 player on our men’s board, Tama Shimabukuro with the 10th pick. Is a trade in the cards for this team or are they planning to be competitive?
Miami is trying but not spending money. The Florida Smash took on Genie Bouchard in an interesting marketing play. Las Vegas is being weird. Carolina still gives zero you know whats.
Overall, the picture that was painted after the draft on Friday is a far more optimistic one than what we saw after the 2025 draft in terms of owner investment in the league.
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
