The New Jersey 5's celebrate winning the first ever MLP mid-season event. From L-R, Zane Navratil, ... [+]
Sunday, July 14th was a massive day in global sports. The Wimbledon Gentlemen’s final started the day, then the 2024 European Championship final, and later in the evening the 2024 Copa America final. The 2024 MLB draft kicked off. And, in the middle of all of it, the 2024 Major League Pickleball mid-season tournament hosted its finals on ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel.
Major League Pickleball (MLP) returned to its roots and had its 2024 “In-season” tournament this past weekend, officially titled the 2024 Advil Targeted Relief MLP Mid-Season Tournament. Unlike the 2024 regular season MLP events, where teams played various matches (or none at all) in pursuit of a season-long point total, this weekend’s event resulted in an end-to-end competition, with winners awarded and money disbursed at the end of the weekend (just like in years prior).
Key Links for tracking the event this weekend, which featured livestreams from the two primary courts at the facility on MLP’s YouTube channel and on PickleballTV.com.
- MLP Grand Rapids Event home page
- Event Scores and Player/Team Standings
- Rosters for Premier and Challenger teams
- Season Standings
Ahead of the weekend, a slew of player substitutions were announced to account for schedule issues. Since all 22 teams are here, there was no opportunity for loan agreements between Premier and Challenger teams, which means a couple of the Challenger teams will be quite under-manned:
- The still-suspended Andrei Daescu was replaced by premier-level talent AJ Koller for the AZ Drive, but they’ll still be badly impacted by the loss of their #1 draft pick.
- Even more badly impacted will be the LA Mad Drops, who will be missing both their top two players Parenteau and Wilson. They’re replaced by Cedarquist and Hovenier.
On the Challenger side:
- California BLQK Bears will have new MLP-Australia draftee subbing in for their just-acquired Susannah Barr.
- The Bay Area Breakers, who made a slew of curious roster decisions in the last trade period, have been forced to temporarily replace three of their team in Grand Rapids, including all three new acquisitions. And they, in one case, chose to replace their new player (Jill Braverman) with .. the same player they jettisoned to waivers (Rachel Rettger) to pick up the new player in the first place. They’ve also added Samantha Parker and, most interesting to this observer, Grayson Goldin to the team for the weekend.
Competition Format
Earlier this year, we thought this would be a single bracket draw, with all teams seeded 1-22 and competing against each other, Premier versus Challenger. MLP chose to change this to have intra-division competitions, which is too bad because it would have been really interesting to see how many challenger teams could pull off upsets.
Premier Competition Recap
DC Pickleball Club was the runner-up in Beer City, but their two men did everything they could. ... [+]
Round of 16s
- The bottom two teams in the league (Carolina, Utah) got swept 3-0 in the round of 16, Carolina’s 3-0 loss flatters Texas a little bit, but is still a shock to the John’s brothers, who lost in doubles again. Utah’s sweep included a 25-9 loss in gender doubles.
- The LA Mad drops, missing their two top players, were the only upset by seed in the play-in round.
Quarters
- #1 St Louis opens their tourney with a 3-0 sweep of Orlando where they never really were troubled. The recent rise of Patriquin on the PPA makes his draft slot and bonus (21st overall and $205k) seem like the steal of the year.
- DC Dominates NY in the 4/5 matchup. After a great showing in Washington, I was expecting more from NY, but their star Jack Sock struggled and lost both his games by nearly double digit points.
- JW Johnson takes over and #3 Dallas cruises to a 3-0 sweep of the Texas team
- #2 New Jersey again flirts with disaster and was stretched to the DreamBreaker by the under-manned AZ Drive before cruising to a 21-9 win to move on. They’re perhaps the best DreamBreaker team out there, so if they can get there, they’re favored.
Semis
- #5 DC scored their second straight upset behind match star Dekel Bar. They win a back and forth gutsy match to upset #1 St. Louis.
- #2 ALW crushed both her matches for wins for #2 New Jersey and Zane/Humberg gutted out a 30-28 win to move into the final 3-1 over Dallas and the Johnson siblings.
Finals and 3rd Place
- In the Premier final, Anna Leigh Waters once again showed why she’s the best female on the planet, willing her team to a victory by winning both her matches and owning the DreamBreaker.
- In the 3rd place match, Texas got revenge for a 3-0 demolishment earlier in the event and won the bronze in a 3-2 DreamBreaker.
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Challenger Competition Recap
The Brooklyn Aces, led by players Lina Padegimaite, Layne Sleeth, Pablo Tellez, and Daniel De La ... [+]
Round of 16s
- The SoCal Hard Eights survived a scare from the Chicago Slice and eked out a DreamBreaker win. SoCal’s Erik Lange & Max Manthou may have won the APP Men’s doubles last weekend in Newport Beach, but they couldn’t beat Jack Munro & Brendan Long. SoCal was bailed out by another APP gold medalist last week in Yana Newell, who won both her doubles matches.
- Travis Rettenmaier improved on his DC performance, but it wasn’t enough to keep his team from falling to the consolation bracket in the DreamBreaker.
Quarters
- Three of the top four seeds advanced as expected, though it wasn’t easy for the #1 seed Las Vegas. Powered by Judit Castillo, they survived a DreamBreaker win over the SoCal Hard Eights.
- The California Black Bears, much to the delight of GM Jimmy Miller, came into the event seeded 10th of 10, but scored an upset of the #2 seed Bay Area Breakers to move into the semis. This is of little surprise, given the curious churn of that team (which came out of Atlanta as the best challenger team).
Semis
- Both Semis came down to DreamBreakers, and the two top teams advanced.
- #1 Las Vegas got a gutsy come-from-behind victory after they had to save match points against to even force a DreamBreaker.
- #3 Brooklyn won a back and forth match to send home the Cinderella #10 California team in a close DreamBreaker.
Finals and 3rd Place
- In the final, Brooklyn gave Las Vegas their first defeat of 2024 behind a dominant performance from Pablo Tellez, who won both his games by fair margins to power Brooklyn to a 3-1 win for the mid-season championship.
- In the 3rd place match, SoCal went up 2-0 by winning both gender doubles matches, but Miami mounted a Mixed Doubles sweep to force the DreamBreaker. Fittingly, it came down to the very end, and SoCal edged Miami 21-19 for the 3rd place crown.
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Player Standings/Stats Analysis for the Weekend:
In Premier:
- A slew of players posted gaudy results for the weekend, but it’s hard not to point out how dominant the DC men were. Dekel Bar was the #1 ranked male of the weekend, but #2 was his teammate James Ignatowich. Bar was 7-1 on the weekend: the sole loss was in the final in mixed. How they missed out on the title is amazing, and shows just how close these matches are.
- The #1 ranked Female? 43-year old Tina Pisnik, who was Challenger last year and not even on the radar of the sport the year before.
- Vivian Glozman made DC’s management look like geniuses; she finished 5th for the weekend, just behind Waters.
- It’s a small sample size, but the worst performer was Megan Dizon, who lost two straight games and was outscored 50-29. It didn’t help that Columbus’ other female (Brooke Buckner) finished 2nd to last, and gives a good indication as to why the Sliders went two and out quickly.
In Challenger:
- No surprise; Pablo Tellez was the weekend’s best performer. The premier talent who was traded down to challenger was the sole player to go undefeated at the event, going 6-0 and winning at a 55.28% clip.
- Several other players had stand out weekends: Milan Rane went 9-1, Rettenmaier went 5-1 to redeem himself from an awful DC performance, and #1 overall challenger pick Vich went 5-1 to lead Atlanta.
- Las Vegas may have made the final, but their GM Kaitlyn Kerr may be looking at their males and shaking her head. Alhouni and Scarpa went just 2-10 for the weekend despite making the playoff final. There seems to be room for improvement here, especially given the depth of men in the sport.
- Bay Area knew they were going to have a rough event, but having all four of their players rank in the bottom 8, and having the worst performer should have them back at the waiver wire in a few weeks’ time after MLP Salt Lake.
General Observations from the weekend
- Apparently, the reason they went away from having all 22 teams together was due to owner complaints about talent mismatches. And certainly that’s a fair assessment; one would expect any premier team to beat any challenger team since the best player on any challenger team is the 49th best player at best after the Premier teams all did their drafts. However, I suspect (without any evidence of course) that some of the owners of the lesser-performing Premier teams were just frankly scared that their team would be beat by an over-performing Challenger team, exposing their incompetence of team construction. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.
- There is a clear divide in the Premier league right now, as evidenced by the results of the opening round. The bottom four teams in the league (Carolina, Columbus, Utah, and LA) combined to go 1-12 in games in the opening round. That may be unfair to LA, who was without its top 2 picks, but the other teams have no excuse.
- If we didn’t already know there seems to be an issue with the Ben Johns/Collin Johns partnership ... the long-time #1 ranked doubles team (recently deposed) failed to win either of its matches this weekend for Carolina as they went home without a single game win as a team. The Johns brothers lost to Alshon/Duong in the opener, then to McGuffin/Staksrud in the loser’s bracket. Now, neither of those is really that “bad” of a loss, especially the McGuffin/Staksrud team (who, if paired together on tour would be the 3rd best team on tour), but still; the entire point of this team was to have Ben dominate and then hope for a win. Ben went 0-3 this weekend. Has he checked out of MLP?
- Tyson McGuffin & Parris Todd won what likely the best (and highest scoring) game we’ve seen in MLP history, taking a 40-38 Mixed win over CJ Klinger & Jackie Kawamoto. In a consolation match. All these players are on salary and stand to gain little from an event like this unless they win, yet the passion and emotion is still there for many.
- One of the big criticisms of the 2024 MLP season has been the loss of the excitement of naming a weekend winner. Will this weekend’s tournament make the MLP organizers re-think their format? The original Steve Kuhn vision of MLP was to create a year-long league with franchises that built fans and following within their home city and built wealth for the franchise owners ... but these players aren’t moving away from their havens of pickleball in Austin/Florida/Southern California/Utah, the events are rotating around cities just like last year, and I believe the loss of “stakes” for the event has really diminished what MLP had grown to be by mid-last summer.
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Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, next weekend there’s an APP NextGen event in St. Louis, the third NPL event in Cincinnati, and a USAP select event at my home club in Richmond.
Next up for the MLP? Their next event is in two weeks’ time in Salt Lake City, to be hosted at a Picklr facility.