MLP Playoffs 2025 (San Diego) – 5 Takeaways – The Choice Heard Around the World
After day 1 of the MLP playoffs on Friday, it wasn’t clear if we were going to get the drama we so badly craved. The Texas Ranchers needed a Dreambreaker to get by Miami, the Shock steamrolled the Squeeze and Dallas was able to persevere for a Dreambreaker win after the Johnson siblings lost an opportunity to clinch the match. Saturday and Sunday ended up being fantastic, though, as the weekend ended up delivering big time from a drama perspective. It sets us up for the best weekend of pickleball in the 5-year history of more legitimate professional pickleball in the most iconic of locations in New York City.
1. The Choice Heard Around the Pickleball World – In the 2025 world where we see one side pitted against the other side in an entrenched debate that no one will concede ground on, the Dallas Flash did their best to unite the pickleball watching world. It seemed like a foregone conclusion going into the event that the Shock and the Flash would pick the two play-in round winners. That did not happen.
Although the Texas Ranchers have a high upside roster, they were not able to put it all together this year at any point. It led to the somewhat desperate trade of Etta Tuionetoa for Kaitlyn Christian. That was followed up by a benching of their star player at the final event of the season in Salt Lake City for what we have heard were some attitude issues during the Dallas event.
Incredibly, the script was flipped in the play-in round as the Ranchers head coach/GM for the past two seasons, Ryan Dawidjan, was relegated to the bleachers as Assistant Coach for the Ranchers / UPA Social Media Manager (according to LinkedIn), Caleb Garrard, manned the sidelines. The word was that Dawidjan was told not to attend the Ranchers practice on Thursday as ownership ended up siding with their star player.
Outside of the gossip factor, the context is very important for this discussion as not only have the Ranchers been struggling to put it together on the court this season, but there were also clearly issues off the court internally that should have made them enticing for the Flash to choose from a matchup perspective.
In spite of all that, the Dallas Flash decided to go with the Columbus Sliders. Owner for the Flash, Mark Molthan, said in an interview on the Pickleball TV broadcast that the decision was made at a team dinner where there was a vote to decide which team to select. To be fair to Dallas, Columbus has apparently been dealing with some “internal strife” of their own as alluded to on the King of the Court podcast a little while ago. Furthermore, Columbus has not exactly been firing on all cylinders this season as Klinger/Daescu, in particular, had not realized their full potential during the regular season.
Still, it was baffling for just about everyone that Dallas made this decision. None of this is hindsight, Monday morning quarterbacking either.
All else being equal, Columbus is a more talented team than Dallas. They have a women’s team that is more capable of beating Jorja/Tyra, which they had already done at the Beer City Midseason Tournament. They have a men’s team that has a higher floor and as high a ceiling as the Ranchers men, even if they did underperform this year.
Most importantly from our perspective, Columbus is a better Dreambreaker team. There are no weak spots in Columbus’s batting order and their women are two of the better women’s singles players on tour.
Pro player, Andrea Koop, and possibly the only person who spoke positively of this choice before the matches were played, commented on Twitter that she loved the decision and Dallas’s trust in its players:
While there is a certain degree of input and trust that teams should give their players, there is a reason that players are not the coaches and GMs in professional sports. LeBron James is the best example of one of the greatest players of all-time often making sub-par transaction decisions for the teams he has played on. Players have different motivations and biases that can (not all the time) cloud their judgment more than a coach or GM.
That’s not to say every decision of a coach or GM will be better than any given player and there are always outliers, but giving players too much autonomy to make a final decision can lead to a situation like the Flash put themselves in.
We’d be very curious to hear the unfiltered motivations behind why the Flash democratically voted on Columbus. Did they think the Columbus drama was more negatively impactful than the Texas drama? Did they feel like their mixed teams stacked up better against Columbus? Did they overestimate how well Augie matched up against Klinger/Daescu after beating them in Grand Rapids? The Flash were 2-1 against the Sliders during the season and they were 2-0 against Texas. Ultimately, it feels like they simply overthought this decision.
One factor that we haven’t brought up yet is the Captain Daescu factor. If there was drama happening for both the Sliders and Ranchers that was relatively equal, Dallas didn’t factor in enough how helpful it is to have a leader that can unite and focus a team.
Columbus had Andrei Daescu, who Federico Staksrud referred to after the weekend as the best competitor in pickleball. Texas had Christian Alshon, who was benched at the end of the season and can’t seem to avoid throwing up middle fingers whenever things aren’t going his way. If the drama of the Sliders factored into the Flash decision to play them, they very much underestimated what a guy like Andrei Daescu can do to will his team to victory. It didn’t hurt that Daescu played out of his mind.
What is also interesting about this discussion is that we probably shouldn’t be here discussing the decision in this way. It seems that most people, including us, felt like Dallas made the wrong decision but they would still come out on top. They survived a Johnson sibling loss and a Dreambreaker on Friday, and had another shot to close the series out on Saturday with the Johnson’s up against Todd/Daescu. The Johnson’s were 27-2 on the season and somehow managed to lose consecutive games against Todd/Daescu at the most important time of the season. If you play out this series 10 times, we’re not sure how many times out of 10 Columbus is winning, but that’s why we play the games.
The other potentially underrated factor in all of this is how the questionable decision impacted the psyche of both teams. Columbus had the inevitable “they picked us”/Sliders versus the world mentality whereas the Dallas players had to be feeling the weight of the decision as things got dicier and dicier. We saw more emotion out of JW Johnson over the course of the series than we have seen in his entire professional pickleball career and that might just tell you everything you need to know about how Dallas was feeling.
Columbus was the better team over the weekend. Andrei Daescu was the best player on the court in all 3 disciplines and has found a way to improve his singles game without playing on tour to the point where he was able match JW Johnson over the course of three Dreambreakers. It was professional sports drama at its absolute finest and a perfect example of why other sports should follow MLP’s lead on making teams choose their matchup in the playoffs.
Columbus won’t be favored to win their matchup against the St. Louis Shock this coming weekend, but there is no way that anyone is counting them out in the semi-finals.
2. Winning a Series is Hard – With all the chalk that the 2025 MLP season has brought our way, the other quarterfinal matchups ended up going chalk. St. Louis beat Orlando, New Jersey beat Texas and LA beat Brooklyn. However, those matchups reminded us how hard it is to win a series in any professional sport. Matchups feel like foregone conclusions but it is not easy to steamroll teams when you have to play them multiple times.
Even in pickleball, teams are going to lock in more on a single postseason matchup, prepare more intentionally and adjust following a loss. The Texas Ranchers nearly put New Jersey on their heels in the first match of the series as their women squandered 5 match points and their men gave up a lead they had at the 6-point switch. They were still able to push the 5’s to a Dreambreaker in the second match after losing both gender games.
The Shock are a much better team than the Squeeze, but the Squeeze gave them a run for their money in the second match of the series. Same thing for a rusty Brooklyn team that had a good look at going to a Dreambreaker against the Mad Drops in their second match as well.
Obviously, we saw what happened with the Sliders against the Flash.
With four teams in the semi-finals without any clear weak spot on each of their roster’s, it’s hard to believe we won’t have some fantastic drama coming our way from the Big Apple.
3. Initial Thoughts on the Semi-Finals – “They picked us” will be the mantra for another week for the Columbus Sliders. A much less surprising decision to see the Shock choose the Sliders over the Ben Johns led LA Mad Drops. It feels like the lesser of two evils by going with the Sliders, and you have to think the Shock would have preferred to have the Flash go through so they could face the 5’s instead of the Sliders.
The tricky thing about the Sliders is that the Shock do not have a clear matchup advantage like they would with the 5’s. Kate Fahey is the least accomplished doubles player of the 4 ladies. The Sliders women smacked the St. Louis women on their home turf, and you might even give the Sliders women the edge there. Klinger/Daescu did not play well against Tardio/Patriquin in St. Louis, but the version of that partnership we saw in San Diego was a much superior version than we have seen all year. If they bring that level against a much tougher team in Tardio/Patriquin, the Shock could be feeling very stressed going into the mixed matchups.
The one aspect of things that the Sliders have not been able to figure out is the Jansen/Klinger mixed combination. They struggled against Fahey/Tardio in St. Louis, and they went 0-3 over the weekend against Augie/Tyra, with only one of those games being close. It’s not really clear to us what the answer is for Jansen/Klinger, but they need to find a win somewhere to give the Sliders a real shot at the upset.
With Bright and Fahey being a strong singles duo, it would be logical for the Shock to want to avoid the Mad Drops solely to get away from the Hunter Johnson/Ben Johns Dreambreaker combo. Ben isn’t the singles demon that he used to be in 2025, but he is still very much an upper echelon player in that #2 slot.. Daescu and Klinger are more than capable, but we sure as heck wouldn’t want to face the Mad Drops top 3 gauntlet in a Dreambreaker.
The 5’s got the best of the Mad Drops in Dallas as they won in a Dreambreaker. Anna Leigh took Ben’s lunch in mixed and won both her matches en route to the win. That will have to be the formula for the 5’s, who match up quite well with the Mad Drops in a Dreambreaker with two higher end men, the ALW cheat code and Dizon not being overmatched against Jade Kawamoto.
There’s no one in the business better than Ben Johns at making adjustments following a loss. That loss against New Jersey in Dallas will likely fuel what appeared to be a supremely motivated Ben Johns in San Diego. Ben has not had many opportunities to play against Anna Leigh Waters and we’ll see if New Jersey continues to pick that matchup to give their team the best shot to win in regulation, or if they decide to go old school New Jersey 5’s on us to secure a Dreambreaker. If ALW wants the Ben smoke again, we expect Ben to be much better prepared for the smoke that ALW brings at him.
Parenteau/Kawamoto are a very strong women’s team, but their lack of high-end firepower is not a great matchup with ALW on the other side of the net. We expect that they should be able to play the 5’s women much closer than the 11-3 scoreline from Dallas and, if the Mad Drops women can find a couple of wins, it will be lights out for the 5’s.
4. Challenger Chalk – We’ll get a rematch of the Beer City Challenger final as the Las Vegas Night Owls and Nashville Chefs took care of business over the weekend. We actually chose California to win in 3 games over Nashville with Genie Erokhina now in for Michelle Esquivel, but something we have underrated throughout the year with Nashville is the Ewa Radzikowks factor. She remains one of the highest floor players on tour, a strong Dreambreaker player and the consummate team player in the MLP format. She won Challenger titles in 2023 with Bay Area and SoCal, and she dragged a sub-par Frisco Pandas roster to a playoff run in 2024. This year, she has been part of a collective veteran team effort to lift the Chefs to a clear 2nd place finish in Challenger.
Nashville will not be favored to win against Las Vegas, but they have given the Night Owls a lot of trouble this year. It looks like Buckner and Wang are back to playing their respective right and left side in women’s, but the Night Owls have stuck to their mixed partnership switch, which creates a different dynamic for the Chefs to contend with.
Genie Erokhina will be the key for the Chefs. Erokhina makes a lot of balls even if it doesn’t look the cleanest and what level she is able to bring will likely dictate whether the Chefs can give the Night Owls a run for their money. Erokhina is probably a mild downgrade from Esquivel in singles as Esquivel has had a lot of singles reps over the course of her pickleball career.
Hopefully Challenger can be a tasty appetizer to the Premier main course.
5. Statty Pickles After Dark – Matty Pickles was looking for someone to come on for his post-Saturday matches live stream on YouTube. One of us and Alex Lantz of The Kitchen answered the call and spent about an hour discussing all things MLP. Give it a watch if you are interested and make sure to subscribe to Matty Pickles on YouTube!
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
What have you guys heard about the falling out between Parris and Lea? Still nothing about Esquivel’s ill-timed retirement?
It sounds like you may already know some stuff. We don’t know anything about Esquivel
I don’t know any stuff. I thought I heard there was something between Lea/Parris from you guys, but maybe it was Zane or KOTC.
Esquivel’s retirement is very odd. She’s not been relevant for years, then on the verge of a potential challenger championship and unrelegation to premier, she up and quits.