MLP Salt Lake City 2025 – 6 Takeaways – The Noe Conundrum
We did it. We made it through a mostly continuous regular season of team-based pro pickleball. Imagine saying that five years ago.
It was no fault of the Utah fans, who always show up for pro pickleball, but this Utah event felt like the final week of the NFL regular season. The reality with regular season professional sports is that a lot of teams are going to be playing meaningless games at the end of the season. This means the good teams are going to rest some players, the intensity might not be as high for others, and you can also get some high-level drama. Unfortunately, the drama wasn’t there for 2025.
Overall, the scheduling felt a little bit too condensed for this first go around at a continuous season. There are hours of MLP on for consecutive weekends from Thursday to Sunday. Anna Bright even mentioned some pickleball fatigue in her appearance on Matty Pickles’s YouTube show, and we feel that, especially with how busy the summer months can get in regular day-to-day life.
The sentiment hasn’t changed much following the conclusion of the regular season for us. We are still in favor of this scheduling situation. A continuous regular season over the summer months is a positive step for MLP, and it has set things up for an incredibly exciting playoff season.
1. The Noe Conundrum – We thought the New Jersey 5’s would be the most interesting team in MLP following their trades for Mari Humberg and Noe Khlif, and that remains the case heading into the playoffs. The transition from Zane Navratil to Noe Khlif in the 5’s starting lineup has not gone as seamlessly as they would have hoped for the last two events of the season, and there will almost certainly be some intense discussions over the next couple of weeks about inserting Zane Navratil back into the lineup.
With the trade for Khlif happening so late in the season, it was a very tough situation for Noe to be thrown into knowing that anything less than winning a title would be seen as a failure. Looking purely at win records for a two-event sample size can be dangerous as it provides little context on the strength of each opponent or the meaning that came with each win or loss. Khlif was 6-4 with Will Howells and 5-4 with Meghan Dizon across two events.
The whole idea with bringing in Khlif is that it theoretically raised the ceiling of the 5’s, especially in mixed and singles. However, the mixed did not look good in Salt Lake City as Khlif/Dizon suffered an 11–0 loss to Freeman/Glozman, an 11–3 loss to Devilliers/Emmrich, a 14–12 loss to Goldin/Phillips, and had an 11–9 win over Fought/Dimuzio, who were 4–17 as a duo on the season.
But how much can you take from what amounted to a bunch of meaningless games against lesser teams this past weekend? It’s hard to say, but it sure makes life difficult for those in charge of the 5’s.
The higher seed gets to pick their matchup throughout the playoffs, and the 5’s will likely have the first real decision to make as the #3 seed. We expect that the Shock and the Flash will be picking the play-in teams as the Ranchers are a step below those top six teams. It won’t be an easy choice for the 5’s as it is a bit of a pick-your-poison between the Mad Drops, Sliders, and Brooklyn Pickleball Team.
Brooklyn is probably the best matchup for the 5’s simply because they don’t stack up in a Dreambreaker as well as the Mad Drops or the Sliders do against the 5’s. And Dekel Bar will be out of rhythm and timing if he does end up playing in the playoffs, as he is expected to.
*Edit: We have since been advised that the 4 seed is exempt from being picked. Only seeds 5 through 8 can be picked so that means Brooklyn is not an option for New Jersey in the playoffs.
We anticipate the 5’s will stick to their guns and go with the higher-upside play with Noe Khlif in the playoffs. Dizon has upped her game a level or two in women’s, and that bodes well for the 5’s. You just don’t make the Khlif trade if you’re going to give up on the decision after two events, one of which was mostly meaningless.
2. Anti-Climactic Playoff Race – The race for the #10 seed and spot in the play-in matchups for the MLP playoffs was more of a turtle crawl in Salt Lake City. Going into the event, it was realistically Miami (18 points) and Chicago (19 points) vying for that final slot as Utah (23 points) was too good and too far ahead to lose out on a playoff spot, and Atlanta (14 points) was too far behind to make anything happen.
The story of the Chicago Slice season remained disappointing. After winning both gender matchups against the Alshon-less Ranchers, Glozman/Freeman dropped a tight mixed match to Kaitlyn Christian/Wyatt Stone and the Slice ended up losing the match in a Dreambreaker. In their most important match of the weekend, the Slice lost in a Dreambreaker to a decimated Miami roster after trading Noe Khlif and Milan Rane.
Miami proceeded to lose to the Ranchers in regulation, the Bouncers in a Dreambreaker, and in regulation to the 5’s. All that mattered for Miami is that they beat the Slice when they needed to because the Slice were a sad 0–5 on the weekend, including a loss to the Squeeze in a Dreambreaker – another match they could have won.
Chicago was 5–20 on the season as they lost 9 of 12 Dreambreakers. That’s almost half of their matches that went to a Dreambreaker. Miami, on the other hand, somehow did enough in Salt Lake City with a roster of Jay Devilliers, Yuta Funemizu, Mya Bui, and Tammy Emmrich.
To expand on another Anna Bright point from her appearance on Matty Pickles’s show, there was a lot of reliance from these lesser teams on newer players making big jumps in their level, but it is not realistic to expect the big jumps those teams needed over the course of five months. That’s not to say it can’t happen going forward, but the Rachel Rohrabacher and Kate Fahey situations are big-time outliers.
With the level of pro pickleball getting so much better, it’s going to become harder and harder for players to have such a rapid rise in the sport. Mya Bui, Max Freeman, and Victoria DiMuzio were all pretty big swings, and the jury is probably still out on all of them until we see another year of pro pickleball under their belt. It’s just incredibly difficult to go from almost no pro pickleball results to needing high-end Premier performance over the course of a few months.
It was an anti-climactic finish in the push for the playoffs, which is par for the course given the disparity of the have versus have-not teams in MLP.
3. Fan Rowdiness – In Dallas, we had the Kate Fahey debate. In Utah, we had the group of young guys heckling Max Freeman and Jay Devilliers. It led to Tyler Loong posing the question on Twitter as to where the line is with spectators and what they can do.
It won’t be a surprise which side of the fence we sit on with this question. Similarly to the screaming discussion, we are most definitely in favour of fan heckling. Obviously, within reason.
What we saw from the Utah boys was nothing other than good old-fashioned fun. The bronze stallion, Jay Devilliers, dealt with it like a champ, as any professional athlete should. This is the behavior we should be embracing. The Waste Management Open, Oakland Raiders fans dressing up, Cameron Crazies type of behavior.
We should want fans to be engaged and not be fearful that their actions will lead to an ejection or instruction to tone it down.
If you want to be a pro athlete or work in pro sports, you need to be able to handle whatever comes your way. Heckling is part of the job description, regardless of the size of someone’s bank account.
The Savannah Bananas are more of a modern-day Harlem Globetrotter entertainment product, but that kind of environment is something that clearly resonates with the masses. We don’t want fans to be crossing any lines, which we know can be subjective, but there’s no reason we should hold back from doing everything we can to differentiate pro pickleball as an entertainment product.
MLP did an under the radar cool thing this weekend by having the players mic’d up in the Challenger matches, which may need some fine tuning given that there were inappropriate comments caught on the hot mic. This is the type of stuff no other pro sport is willing to do that pro pickle can use to its advantage.
Let’s keep pushing the envelope for pro pickleball.
4. Las Vegas Struggling – Unsurprisingly, the Las Vegas Night Owls finished as the regular season Challenger points leaders. Surprisingly, they did not finish the season as well as they started it.
The Night Owls came into the Challenger season as heavy favorites, featuring three legitimate Premier-level starters on their team – Pablo Tellez, Brooke Buckner, and Zoey Wang. They drafted an unknown second male starter in James Delgado, who proved to be a highly talented but raw product on the court.
The season started out exactly as everyone expected for Las Vegas, but it has slowly descended into uncertainty. The stakes were minimal at the beginning of the season. However, now that MLP has changed the rules to allow only one Challenger team to move up to Premier in 2026, the stakes are higher than ever.
It has been a slog of a season for all the Challenger teams, who essentially played a five-game round robin with the other Challenger teams at every event they attended. The monotony could lead to a lack of focus, where the games felt meaningless before the changes to the stakes were announced late in the season. The extended round robin could have contributed to Las Vegas’s inability to sustain their high level in the first half of the season.
Still, things are looking worse than ever following the final regular season event. Not only is Vegas struggling to win at the rate they did earlier in the season, but they are also making lineup decisions that likely indicate internal struggles.
The first move teams make to shake things up is to switch up the mixed pairings, which is exactly what Vegas has done. Not only have they changed their mixed pairings, but they have also had their women switch sides. The problem is that Wang has spent her entire pickleball career playing the left in both women’s and mixed. This cannot be optimal from a pure pickleball perspective, and it suggests a certain level of desperation from Vegas.
As hard as it may be to break into the higher ranks of pro pickleball, this Vegas team may be another Challenger reminder of how fast the game changes – we have seen this ever since the inception of Challenger. A roster with three solid but not spectacular Premier-capable starters is not the stone-cold lock it appeared to be back in March.
We’ll have to see what they end up doing come playoff time, but their final weekend of regular season play, which included Dreambreaker wins against Nashville and Bay Area and a regulation loss to California, shows that the Night Owls may be more vulnerable than they’ve been all year.
5. Weird Alshon Stuff – Wyatt Stone played the entire weekend for the Texas Ranchers in place of Christian Alshon, who did not travel with the team and appeared to be fully healthy, as shown by social media posts of a workout and practice with other top Florida-level players. Alshon even responded to someone on Twitter who commented on his workout, suggesting he wanted the weekend off, with: “More complicated than that pal.”
On top of this, Pablo Tellez and Ranchers teammate Eric Oncins were commentating a match on Grandstand. During a break in play, Tellez asked Oncins whether Alshon would be back for the playoffs, and Oncins awkwardly deferred the question to their Coach and GM. Tellez then added commentary about how strange it was for a top 3/top 5 player across all divisions to be “benched.” No pushback from Oncins on the characterization of Alshon’s absence.
Benched.
With the #6 seed and a play-in bye on the line, Alshon was not with his team despite appearing to be fully healthy. All signs point to Alshon being benched, with little information as to why.
As always, we never really know what’s going on in these situations. It is very difficult in any sport for a team to maintain control over star players if there are behavioral or attitude issues, and it’s even harder in pro pickleball when teams only have one bench spot.
To be clear, we don’t know for certain if there are attitude or effort issues, but something has to be going on for Alshon to be benched at this point in the season. It seems evident that the Ranchers have prioritized long-term team culture over and above a potential bye.
The vibes have felt off with the Ranchers all year. Unfulfilled expectations. Tuionetoa/Pisnik not playing well. It led to the trade of Tuionetoa for Christian, which was an odd move from our perspective. Now, we have the Alshon benching.
Something we can’t help but speculate on is how difficult the dynamic might be when a team coach potentially clashes with a player’s personal coach. We have so few coaches in pro pickleball, but Leigh Waters coaching Alshon is one of the few clear-cut coach-player relationships on the PPA Tour, with Waters regarded as the most respected coach in all of pickleball.
We have no knowledge that anything is happening between Ranchers coach and GM Ryan Dawidjan, Leigh Waters, and Christian Alshon. We’re simply acknowledging the potential for this dynamic to play out given the unique nature of pro pickleball as both an individual and team-based sport.
Something bigger is going on internally with the Ranchers, and it does not bode well for them heading into the most important part of the season.
6. Palm Beach Royals – On Thursday, July 31st, it started making the rounds on social media that there was a new account for the Palm Beach Royals, which included an MLP logo and a website. On Friday, August 1st, it was announced that the Palm Beach Royals were MLP’s newest expansion team, purchased at an undisclosed “record-high valuation” by Zach Hunter and Taylor Meyer of Hyperspace Ventures.
Most interestingly, the Royals will start 2026 in Premier. Pending further announcements, that means there will be 18 Premier teams and five Challenger teams in 2026 — which had to feel like a kick in the teeth to Challenger teams who quite recently found out they most likely won’t be promoted to Premier next season.
In the inaugural edition of her newsletter, Anna Bright noted that the Royals “must have paid a pretty penny to be in Premier off the jump” and speculated that their arrival will likely drive up the cost of securing players in the 2026 auction draft.
Following the announcement, Bright casually noted in response to our post on Twitter that there was an informal “gentleman’s agreement” between teams to retain top players they were forced to let go. That will no longer be the case, with the Shock and Flash now having to drop one of their true franchise-building block keepers.
Bright’s comments are noteworthy but also shine a light on a lingering issue for 2026 – the talent pool across Premier. The Flash and Shock having to part with top-tier players might lead to a slightly more even distribution of talent, but the reality is that two more teams are joining Premier.
The Palm Beach Royals may be prepared to spend whatever it takes to build a strong roster. If they do, the main shift will be in the amount of money teams spend to secure top talent. A new franchise at a “record-high valuation” and increased auction money means desperately needed cash flow for the UPA, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem currently plaguing MLP.
The media release stated that the Royals’s player acquisition process will be announced during the offseason, and we’re curious to see what that entails. The league’s previous decisions in similar matters haven’t inspired much confidence that they’ll navigate this creatively or optimally.
But hey, we’ve been wrong plenty of times before.
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
This is just outstanding analysis. Major League Pickleball is still in the early stages and there is a long uneasy road ahead, but I think the league made great strides this year.
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