2026 MLP Weekly Round Up (Week 3) – St. Louis Takeaways and Austin Preview
We’re already 3 weeks through the MLP season and we have learned a lot about the teams in a very short period of time. The event winner format is undoubtedly a win for the league even as we try to figure out the nature of the standings points and what teams need to do at each event to reach a certain level in the standings. But that should all be worked out as we work our way through the season. Do better and get more standings points. Fairly straightforward.
1. No Shock or Awe – It was about as good a performance as the Shock could have asked for in their hometown, which really wasn’t surprising or awe-inducing in any way, shape or form. St. Louis went undefeated at Chaifetz Arena and they did so in convincing fashion. Their two toughest matches on paper, Orlando and LA, were dominant performances and there was no let up the entire weekend. There was no fatigue on the back end of three consecutive MLP weekends to start the year.
After a down weekend in Columbus, Hayden Patriquin was the player of the weekend in the Lou, at least based on the Player Impact + rating produced by Real Clear Stats. The reality with Patriquin is that you are going to get higher highs and some lower lows than other top 5 or 10 players. Playing one game to 11 also leads to more volatility, making it harder to glean too much from any given weekend.
There have been questions out there in the social media sphere about the money it cost to get Anna Bright and whether it was worth it, but that is a moot point to us. Billionaire owners flying their players around on their private jet paying $1.2 million to guarantee franchise relevance is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. If you don’t treat your money like Tom Dundon, it’s a no brainer to spend the money that the Chaifetz family spent on Anna Bright.
This past weekend is the reason that you pay the money to do that. No one is saying that Anna Bright is Anna Leigh Waters and she isn’t going to have the impact on a team that Anna Leigh Waters has. Conversely, looking at that $1.2M figure in a vacuum is a disservice to the market forces at play in the 2026 draft. The Shock probably made the wrong decision from a financial decision to drop Anna Bright, but they also knew that they would do whatever it would take to get her back.
The dollars spent on professional athletes only matter as it relates to team building. So long as the current high spending does not affect future team building and spending, the money ownership spends is entirely irrelevant. There is no salary cap or luxury tax. The spending ensured top tier competitiveness.
And the Shock are as competitive as they have ever been in MLP.
2. Brooklyn’s Hard Luck – It’s pretty clear that no one has had a rougher stretch than the Brooklyn Pickleball Team for the past year in MLP. In 2025, Dekel Bar missed the majority of the season with a couple of different issues. Brooklyn was still able to put together a quality season on the backs of their top tier women and super sub, AJ Koller. Their ceiling, however, was limited by the fact that Dekel was not healthy, whatever that ceiling was to begin with.
Brooklyn sat out the first two events of 2026 and, of course, Riley Newman had to pull out of their first event of the season part way through due to an injury. Brooklyn still finished the event in third after Chris Haworth admirably filled in for Newman over the course of four matches, including against the LA Mad Drops and Orlando Squeeze. Haworth got the all-important game win to secure a 3-1 victory over Orlando against Sock/Schneemann in mixed.
It is unclear if Newman is going to miss any significant time, but Haworth looked good in the limited playing time he saw this past weekend. The short history of MLP is littered with examples of unknowns who have used MLP as an opportunity and stepping stone into the bright lights of pro pickleball. Is this Chris Haworth’s time? Pickleball TV commentator, Michelle McMahon, expressed her belief in Haworth on X, alluding to the past history of such opportunities for players:
Call us haters, non-believers or whatever you want, but it’s hard to expect Haworth will fall into the bucket of lesser-known commodities using MLP as a stepping stone to future success. There’s just not much in Haworth’s doubles results to suggest that he simply needs an opportunity. His big serve and ground strokes play well in mixed Squeeze, and he can undoubtedly find some results with a player like Jackie Kawamoto as he did on Sunday against the Squeeze. However, Haworth does not fit the mold of the history of players seizing a new opportunity like Parris Todd (2022 BLQK), James Ignatowich (20222 Ranchers), Rachel Rohrabacher (2023 Squeeze), Christian Alshon (2023 Breakers and DCPT) and CJ Klinger (2023 Hard Eights).
Haworth who has been playing pro pickleball for some time with big time singles results and essentially nothing in the way of consistently notable doubles results. This is not to say that Haworth can’t be a relatively capable fill-in and there is a real argument to be made that he provides more upside juice in mixed compared to Riley Newman. Regardless, there is a big difference between capable fill-in and untapped star potential who can help the team maintain contender status.
Brooklyn showed that they are exactly who we thought they were over the weekend. They are one of the 5 best teams in MLP, if healthy. It remains unclear, with or without Newman, whether they can be anything more.
3. Viva Las Vegas – With the new rules for substitutions in 2026, it has been interesting to see some of the bottom half teams giving an opportunity for all 6 of their players to see the court over the course of the weekend. There isn’t a team utilizing its whole roster to the level of success that the Las Vegas Night Owls are seeing. All 3 of their women, Liz Truluck, Chao Yi Wang and Callie Smith, are seeing meaningful court time and their young bench male, Braden Jacobsen, is even seeing Super Sunday playing time along with Blaine Hovenier and Roscoe Bellamy.
It has been a relatively hot start for Las Vegas, as they sit tied for 8th in the standings with the Orlando Squeeze based on points per event. Yes, it is only two events, and sure they needed a Dreambreaker to beat the Hogs in Columbus and they lost to the tied for 18th Phoenix Flames in St. Louis, but this season is going to move quickly. Las Vegas is finding some wins against better than expected opponents (beat Atlanta and Utah) and giving some better teams a run for their money (took Palm Beach to a Dreambreaker).
The Night Owls are not a roster that we feel more inspired by. At the same time, they have a group of people that are going out there and competing hard no matter what, backed by a veteran coach. Blaine Hovenier’s energy and passion may be one of the bigger intangible catalysts for a team with no chance at a title. What do you have to play for when a title is not in reach? Well, Blaine is always playing for keeps and that permeates the rest of the roster.
For these bottom half type of teams in a regular season format, being motivated and hungry for every match is a real difference maker, and it should have been more foreseen that Vegas could overshoot their roster talent due to their roster personalities and organization infrastructure. There isn’t anyone on that team that is going to give anything other than full effort, and that can’t be said for a good chunk of the rosters out there in MLP.
4. Predictability Remains – While we wrote about balance being restored in MLP after the first event of the season, it is also evident that there remains a fairly high level of predictability on a weekly basis in the current landscape of MLP. The middle class is bigger and better than it was in 2025, but there is a clear hierarchy at the top of the league, featuring a little bit more variability with the Mad Drops being a true contender in 2026.
Through 3 events, the teams that have been able to come first, second or third in an event are the St. Louis Shock, New Jersey 5’s, LA Mad Drops, Columbus Sliders and Brooklyn Pickleball Team. Those 5 teams formed the consensus top 5 preseason rankings in some kind of order.
There are a bunch of other teams in the middle or middle-ish class with Orlando, Dallas, Palm Beach, Texas, Las Vegas (surprise!), Utah, Atlanta and Chicago. Other than Miami likely being a middle-class team before selling their best player (yet again), we are about where we expected things to be going into the season. Vegas has been a little bit better. Utah has been a little bit worse. We still only have one event worth of data from Texas, Chicago, Florida, California and SoCal, and Texas should be more interesting with Acevedo in the fold, but it feels safe to say that we have a pretty good handle on what the league looks like after 1 or 2 events from most teams.
The Super Sunday format ensures a climax at each event, but there is also a lot of relatively uninteresting pickleball being played every weekend.
Is this different from any other sports league? Maybe not really to a certain extent. Although it does highlight that we could have a much more exciting league had we kept a larger separation between Challenger or Premier, or simply avoided such a massive expansion of the league prior to the time this current regime was in place.
The one thing that MLP is missing right now is surprise teams. The predictability is largely a byproduct of having 20 teams, but the lack of any meaningful unpredictability in the results through three events makes it feel like it is not even necessary at times to watch the product. There are always unexpected teams making and missing the playoffs in the NFL. The San Antonio Spurs were not supposed to contend for a title in Victor Wembenyama’s third season in the NBA. The Toronto Blue Jays weren’t seen as anything close to a title contender in 2025 and were one step away from winning a World Series.
The only real variability in the MLP season is how teams perform within their expected tiers. While there is parity at the top (as Anna Bright pointed out in her latest newsletter) and more balance across the league, MLP is still suffering from a lack of unpredictability.
5. MLP Austin Preview – How the heck are they putting together these groups? Group A is the softest group we have seen in 2026 as Columbus gets California, SoCal, Miami (with Dylan Frazier in for Nico Acevedo) and the Carolina Hogs. California actually gave Columbus some real trouble recently, so we’ll have to see if Columbus can find that top tier status.
Anna Bright noted in her recent newsletter that the passive style of Catherine Parenteau and Jade Kawamoto could be negatively impacting their results, and we wonder if the same might be said for Andrei Daescu and CJ Klinger, two grind it out guys without truly elite weapons. They sorted out their early relative struggles in 2025, so we’ll have to see if anything changes for Daescu/Klinger going forward.
Group B features New Jersey, Dallas, Texas, Atlanta, Bay Area and Florida. It makes no sense not to have Dallas or Texas in Group A as this group features 3 (maybe even 4) playoff teams whereas Group A features just one. The Texas Ranchers at their hometown event are the team to watch this weekend with the addition of right side Acevedo and the under the radar trade for Marcela Hones, who appears to have been picked up on waivers solely to provide elite bench energy based on the comments from Ranchers GM and head coach, Caleb Garrard.
The consensus right now is that we will get a Columbus and New Jersey final, with the 5’s as the consensus favorite to win the event. If we end up getting this matchup, this will undoubtedly be the most interesting part of the weekend but a close second for us is how Group B shakes out, particularly the battle of the Lone Star state.
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