5 Burning Questions About the 2025 MLP Playoffs

The MLP Playoffs are here and it has arrived very fast with the revamped condensed summer season. If you are a pro pickleball fan but haven’t cared enough to tune in to the regular season, this is the time to lock in. Treat it like any other sport where a bunch of people give zero craps about the regular season but tune in only for the playoffs. It is shaping up to give us the most exciting MLP matchups that we have seen in the short history of the league. 

We self-answer our 5 most burning questions going into the 2025 MLP Playoffs. 

1. How does this freakin’ playoff thing work in Premier? 

If we have questions about how the playoffs work, there is undoubtedly a large group of the general pickleball watching public that must have no idea what the heck is going on. 10 of the 16 teams in Premier advanced to the playoffs. Seeds 7 through 10 play a one match play-in round. The #7 seeded Texas Ranchers got to pick their matchup and chose to play the Miami Pickleball Club, which means the Orlando Squeeze will play the Utah Black Diamonds. 

The winner of the one match play-in round moves on to the quarterfinals where the higher seed gets to pick their matchup from seeds 5 through 8. That means the #1 seeded St. Louis Shock will have their choice of the winners of the play-in rounds or the Columbus Sliders and LA Mad Drops. We will be shocked if the play-in teams are not the first two teams selected by the #1 and #2 seed in the quarterfinal. 

The top seed in the semifinals will get to pick their matchup from the two lowest remaining seeds that have advanced. 

The quarterfinals, semis and finals will all be played as a best 2 out of 3 series. In the first two games, the higher seed will get “home field” advantage, meaning they get to react to their opponent’s mixed doubles and Dreambreaker lineup and choose side and serve. If it goes to a third match, a coin toss will determine home vs. away.  The play-in and quarters will be played in San Diego this coming weekend and the semis and finals in New York the following weekend. 

The ability for teams to pick their matchups is a cool wrinkle that other sports have talked about doing but never have done. Extra drama is always good!

One comment on the home field advantage situation is that it seems like too big of an advantage to the higher seed. You want to reward higher seeds for good regular season performance but it feels like overkill to give home field advantage for the first two matches, and possibly a third, to the higher seed. Why not just flip it around like they do in other sports? Home field goes to the higher seed for the first and third matches, and the lower seed gets it for the second match. That would also slightly increase the odds for better drama of getting to a third match in the series. 

2. Which team is the most intriguing going into the playoffs? 

It has to be the LA Mad Drops. We have watched the top two seeds play for two seasons and have a pretty good idea of what they are all about. The Mad Drops, on the other hand, we have only seen for one event with the silliness around the extended trade deadline. 

As a #6 seed, the Mad Drops are likely to get a pretty good matchup in the quarterfinals. They won’t be picked by the Shock or the Flash, and it would be equally as surprising if the New Jersey 5’s chose to play the Mad Drops over the #5 seed Columbus Sliders. That would mean LA gets a matchup with the Brooklyn Pickleball Team, who will have Dekel Bar back from injury for his first pickleball event in quite some time (76 days according to Erik Tice).

Brooklyn is fortunate that it is a #4 seed as they avoid being selected by any of the top 3 seeds. However, it’s a small consolation prize when the LA Mad Drops are the matchup. The Mad Drops are an excellent Dreambreaker team if they aren’t firing on all cylinders in doubles whereas Brooklyn is an average at best Dreambreaker team. 

Not surprisingly, the other most intriguing team has to be the New Jersey 5’s. Are they going to roll with Khlif and Dizon? What happens if they lose the first game? Can Anna Leigh Waters carry the 5’s to her first MLP title? 

So many questions, so little time to sort it out for the 5’s. 

3. Can the play-in teams make any noise? 

It is not out of the question. The Ranchers are a heavy favorite over Miami. We have written about the weird vibes with the Ranchers team, but that doesn’t mean they can’t put it all together for a short series against a tough opponent. Kaitlyn Christian is a big question mark and what level she can bring. How will Alshon respond to being benched in the final event of the season?

We’ll give the slight edge to the Utah Black Diamonds to get past the Orlando Squeeze in a toss-up matchup. If Orlando comes out on top, we don’t really see them as a team that can give a top seed as much trouble as Utah can. The Milan Rane addition for the Squeeze makes them tougher against the Black Diamonds, but it doesn’t move the needle for us in the grand scheme. However, Utah feels like a hokey sports movie of a team whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Makes sense, right?

The one thing that puts Utah in a tough spot is having two below average female Dreambreaker players. It is already a Herculean task to knock off one of the top 2 seeds, but it is made that much more difficult to be well behind the eight ball going into a Dreambreaker. Orlando is much better suited to win a Dreambreaker.

4. What is happening in Challenger? 

After the purchase of an expansion MLP franchise that will start in Premier for 2026, the winner of the 2025 Challenger playoffs will be one of two new teams in Premier next season. It is a 6-team playoff bracket with the first two seeds getting a bye – Las Vegas Night Owls and Nashville Chefs. 

The quarterfinals is one match, March Madness style with California playing Florida and D.C. playing Bay Area. The semifinals will also be played in San Diego this coming weekend. Just like in Premier, the higher seed gets to select their opponent and California obviously chose Florida. 

It will be very surprising if California does not make it through, and they will not be chosen by Las Vegas, should that happen. California is a far different team with Michael Loyd and Martin Emmrich as a major upgrade from their opening day roster of Rafa Hewett and Juan Benitez.

Las Vegas has to be the pick to win it all but they seem to have gotten worse and worse as the season has gone along. The thing is, they are so good in a Dreambreaker and it will be tough for any opponent to win twice in regulation against them. Nashville is also without Michelle Esquivel who oddly left the team before the final event and has now retired from pro pickleball. We would have thought Genie Erokhina was an upgrade if you had asked us before the season but there was something about MLP Michelle Esquivel that was getting things done in 2025. 

5. Who is going to win the whole damn thing? 

There are 4-teams that realistically have a chance to win – St. Louis, Dallas, New Jersey and LA. Brooklyn and Columbus are very outside shots, especially if there is “internal strife” in Columbus. Based purely on overall team record, the Shock have to be the odds on favorites. Their gender teams combined for a record of 50-9 and their mixed teams combined to go 44-9 (records courtesy of Matty Pickles). 18 total losses on the season is truly insane. 

Every other team has a weaker pairing somewhere or, at the very least, a question mark. Augie/JW went a concerning 16-13 as Augie has had a plateau 2025 PPA and MLP season. The 5’s men’s team and #2 mixed team are far from a sure thing.  The Mad Drops feel like the most solid of the non-Shock teams so long as Ben/Hunter can sort things out. 

We had the Flash as the #1 team in our power rankings to start the season because the gap between them and the Shock felt so close.

The only concern that we have with St. Louis is that they might want it too much. Pressure is a funny thing, and we saw it happen last year in the playoffs when St. Louis did not bring their best. This ownership group and the players want it so much that it may not be the ideal environment.

Dallas wants it, but they also don’t carry with them the weight of the need to win. 

That being said, we can’t in good conscience go against what our head is telling us, which is that the Shock’s time is now.

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