MLP Orlando 2025 – 3 Takeaways – Predictably Predictable
The season opening MLP event in Orlando felt like it had more going on than any MLP event we have had to date. While we do recall that the first MLP of 2023 in Mesa was very hectic with a swatch of new teams and characters in the mix, there were a number of uniquely unexpected wrinkles to the first MLP event of 2025.
The Orlando Squeeze / Door Dash orange that surrounded the courts quickly got lost in the shuffle despite the fact that it remained difficult to see the ball on a phone or laptop screen throughout the weekend. And apparently it affected the players too. The court color was far less concerning than a lot of other things that went on this weekend. We’ll chalk that up to an understandable oversight and lesson that MLP will learn from before a home team uses its team colors to paint the courts again.
We have a few takeaways to get to but we also want to remind you that we posted an article with our take of the Anna Leigh Waters-Hayden Patriquin drama on Monday, which was undoubtedly the hottest topic from the weekend.
1. Predictably Predictable Results – As exciting as this first MLP weekend was, you would have been hard pressed to script a more predictable event. Being a pickleball pundit for MLP was easier that it has ever been for the first event. Most everything went according to plan.
The Dallas Flash were dominant as they beat up on bad teams like the Hustlers and made quick work of teams still figuring it out like Columbus and Chicago. New Jersey was not dominant as they went 5-1 with 2 Dreambreaker wins but they were better than everyone, except St. Louis over the weekend.
The upper-middle class teams like Texas and Columbus showed they have the potential to break into the elite echelon of MLP but they are not there yet. Brooklyn couldn’t get a win against a “better” team as they took the 5’s and Shock to Dreambreaker losses and they found wins against lesser teams.
The bad teams were bad as the only team outside of the top 8 of our preseason power rankings to get a win against a top half team was the Orlando Squeeze over the LA Mad Drops, who were without Hunter Johnson the whole weekend.
To be fair, it is often the case in professional sports where you have teams that are tiered to some degree, with have and have not teams sprinkled around the league. Right now, the difference is that the have not teams are really bad and entirely uncompetitive with the have teams in MLP.
It’s a far cry from what we saw in 2024 when the Utah Black Diamonds started off the year as a laughing stock and, following the Connor Garnett trade, they became a spirited last place team that no team was keen to see on their schedule. Every Premier team was competitive in 2024 and there weren’t really any free wins to go around. You had to earn your wins.
MLP showed, once again, that it is a good product with the right matchups. We saw that throughout the weekend with the Shock-5’s, Sliders-Ranchers, Brooklyn-Shock, Mad Drops-5’s. Even the lesser teams playing one another can be fun to watch. The issue is that it becomes a sub-par product, particularly with side out scoring, when the tiers start facing off against one another.
There are ways that MLP could have solved this issue, but they have chosen not to go down those routes yet. A salary cap floor for teams could have helped some level of buy-in required from teams like the New York Hustlers and SoCal Hard Eights. There is no promotion-relegation system as we trend towards having a league that is one division without enough talent in the player pool to create that many competitive teams.
The other issue the league has is that without teams having home matches, teams don’t have to worry about the product they are putting out in terms of trying to fill the stands. It still seems that the best method MLP teams could go to is a club model where they have a home facility to not only host matches, but also have a club where players of all levels play under their team banner. It seems that would be the easiest way to generate actual long term invested fans in the teams and league.
A large focus around the structure of the league for the past two years has been ensuring they can maximize cash flow rather than safeguard competitive balance. The auction structure, while entertaining and unique, has led to only the franchises willing to set their cash on fire as the teams that are able to compete for a title. The league’s focus on cash flow, and having league fees makes it very peculiar that they didn’t put in a salary cap floor, which would have accomplished both generating cash for the league and a more competitive balance.
More concerningly, the UPA appears to be unbothered by the lack of competitive balance, at least outwardly. Newly minted MLP Commissioner, Samin Odwhani, made light of the NY Hustlers situation on X in his preseason burning questions. Tom Dundon continues to roll out the sorriest excuse for a franchise as Ben Johns remains in MLP purgatory for another year.
It has been encouraging to see more non-pickleball sponsors investing in the sport like DoorDash, but we are curious what the long-term plan is to guarantee a more consistent product from match to match. It was a lot of fun to have MLP back this week and we remain steadfast in our belief that it is the superior pro pickleball product. However, the competitive balance issue needs to be solved if MLP is going to have a chance to succeed in the short and long run.
2. Side Out Scoring Thoughts – The side out vs. rally scoring debate was a hotter topic than either of us expected. Prior to the season opener, we had thought the impact of side out vs. rally was overstated and we would see a similar product to the first 2021 version of MLP that had side out scoring games to 15. The reviews seem to be mixed for what scoring method people prefer, but we are not enthralled with the early returns on the change to traditional scoring.
Let’s start with some data courtesy of Ben at Real Clear Stats and Matt Klitch, aka Matty Pickles. According to Real Clear Stats, the average game length in Orlando was 37.42 rallies per game, which is 9 rallies shorter than 2024 (rally to 25) and 2 rallies shorter than 2023 (rally to 21). He also posted as per the second graphic above that game lengths were more than double the volatility compared to what was calculated in early 2023.
Matty Pickles shared that the average scoring margin was identical to what it was in 2024, but the rate of 2-point games and Dreambreakers was lower through one event. Although the scoring margin is identical, a comeback from 5-10-1 down is going to look a lot different than being down 19-24 when you can score points with simply getting a stop.
As always, this is a small sample size, and we likely need to see this play out over at least another event or two before making any bold proclamations. Furthermore, any takes need to factor in the changed landscape of 2025 MLP where the lack of parity could be contributing to more volatility in the game score margins.
Our early take on moving to traditional scoring to 11 is that it is sub-optimal for MLP. One thing we have been mulling is whether we didn’t see any issue with traditional scoring in the first MLP event because the MLP concept was so cool in itself. MLP tried using pure rally scoring with no freeze for the first event of 2024 and that was a huge dud from an entertainment standpoint. The move to traditional scoring feels reminiscent of taking the freeze away from rally scoring.
That’s not to say traditional scoring can’t be amazing and exciting. There were some really good matches this weekend – the Columbus/Texas match featured some incredibly close games. This is only to say that rally scoring, for MLP purposes, is probably better.
It is interesting because the significant decrease in the number of rallies per game should create more volatility, which should lead to more upsets. However, with the huge disparity in competitive balance, there are too many lopsided games that don’t last very long and can become uninteresting quickly. There may also be less room for comebacks with fewer rallies even where teams are relatively equal to one another but one team doesn’t get off to a good start.
Whether it is real or an illusion, there feels like there is less scoreboard pressure on players in traditional scoring than there is in rally scoring with the requirement to win on serve. This was pointed out by Andrea Koop on X and it confirms the feeling that we had when watching matches over the weekend. When a team is up 10-6, things just feel dire whereas there feels like there is more of a chance in rally scoring – on top of the ability for the returning team to score in rally, the serving team only has one opportunity to close out a match each time they get the ball, which creates extra pressure.
Leaving aside any possible self-interested motivations, we would have liked people like PPA Commissioner, Connor Pardoe, and the Kitchen to expand on their early proclamations that traditional scoring is the way to go.
Odhwani has essentially stated that the decision to go to traditional scoring boiled down to using the same scoring method that every participating pickleball player uses. That, in itself, is a logical reason to make a decision but we do question moving away from something that just seems to work better for the MLP product. It’s almost like the old Seinfeld joke where we have been flying first class and now we have to go back to coach.
We’ll let this play out more before definitively taking a stance that rally scoring is the better way to go for MLP, but the early returns would suggest that rally is better from a pure entertainment perspective.
3. Rapid Fire Complaints – This is feeling more like a complaints list than a takeaways column but that’s the way it goes sometimes. We’ll spend more time going through the teams after Columbus. For today, we want to give a few quick hit issues from the first event.
Serve Rule: So much controversy about the serve and another set of new serving rules that MLP is trying to enforce. We’re aren’t really sure why PPA and MLP have made this so complicated. The USA Pickleball serve rule was somewhat difficult to enforce but there’s no way that any of these new rules are easier to enforce. We know it’s not going to happen, but the quickest fix to this is to return to the current USAP serving rule and ask referees to enforce it. Don’t allow challenges of service calls and tweak enforcement as needed between events.
MLP has made three rule changes coming out of the first event (surprise!) and the first is to go to the PPA serve rules. It is beyond us to explain why they have been trying to create separate rules to begin with. It’s interesting that MLP’s logic on moving to side out scoring was because that is how most people play. While serving isn’t as obvious, it’s just interesting they are not choosing to apply similar logic to other rule decisions.
We said it before and we’ll say it again about enforcing the USAP rule. If it walks like an illegal serve and talks like an illegal serve, then it is an illegal serve. If we’re going to refuse to go to the drop serve, let’s stop making this so complicated because we are tired of keeping up with this.
Scoreboard: There are two issues here. The first is not MLP specific, but it remains baffling that we still can’t get the scoreboard correct. When we were at MLP events last year, there was literally a production person who would manually monitor the score and the focus level was questionable at best from what we could see. We have no idea if this process is still the same but let’s get this right. The second part of this is that we need to show the game scores between teams on the scoreboard so fans know what’s happening immediately when they tune in. These should be easy but it’s 2025 and we still can’t have an accurate scoreboard.
Challenges: Most challenges are taking far too long. This is not a problem that is unique to pro pickleball. Decision-makers, usually referees, are so concerned about the criticism that can come with getting the call wrong that it takes far too long to come to a final decision. The easiest fix for this would be a 2 or 3 minute timer to make a decision. Pro sports leagues are too concerned about getting calls 100% right and are not concerned enough about how short the average consumers attention span is.
Sub Rule: No one was happy with the sub rule when they realized that AJ Koller, an on-site substitute, was able to fill-in for Hunter Johnson rather than Wes Burrows, who was drafted by the LA Mad Drops but did not travel to Orlando. Understanding that it’s not ideal for teams to spend thousands of dollars to pay for their subs to travel to events they have no intention of playing, it’s not a good look for the league that we have expanded rosters without the need for those players on the team to play when a starter cannot go.
It looks like MLP gave into the peer pressure on this sub rule. Sort of. There is now a 1-point penalty for any team using an on-site sub. It’s basically a non-penalty and it represents another example of MLP seemingly making a change without considering the consequences. You have expanded rosters but allow for on-site subs. People are going to be confused. Teams that bring players to events will be upset. So, MLP makes a non-adjustment, adjustment to the rules in attempt to placate.
Benches
We should also note that MLP made one other change that stops this whole back and forth side switching of benches during matches. The side switching never made a lot of sense and the larger benches that have resulted from teams having more players on their team was likely the impetus to this. This change could allow teams to be more in the ear of their opponents on court during matches and might spice things up a little more from that perspective.
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