Columbus Makes Dallas Pay As Favorites Advance In Major League Pickleball Playoffs

Columbus Slider Andrei Daescu powered his team to a shocking upset win over defending champs Dallas Flash.

MLP

Major League Pickleball (MLP) held the first two rounds of its 2025 Playoffs this past weekend in San Diego, and fans were treated to a combination of the expected and the unexpected results and play on and off the court.

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.

Transaction Recap

Ahead of the weekend, we learned that Brooklyn’s star Dekel Bar would be returning after months away from his team due to injury and would be reinserted in the lineup in place of super-sub AJ Koller. Koller spent some time onsite as the player alternate, but also joined Dave Fleming in the booth and was a great voice calling the matches. We also saw the Bay Area Breakers replace Sam Querrey with Jonathan Truong once again, allowing him to play alongside sister Alix in their matches.

Also, after a non-injury benching, Texas’ star Christian Alshon was back in action for his team, with the predictable questions surrounding some social media posts circulating that showed the Ranchers Coach/GM sitting in the stands instead of at courtside.

MLP End of Season Awards Announced

In the lead-up to the weekend, the results of the fan voting for the league’s four main awards were announced. I previewed my ballot and predictions last week, and here’s how the voting went:

• Premier League 2025 Most Valuable Player: Jorja Johnson, Dallas Flash. No surprise here as she led the league in most statistical categories.
• Premier League 2025 Most Improved Player: Kate Fahey, St. Louis Shock. Shen went from a .500 player last year to a dominant 44-14 this year.
• Challenger League 2025 Most Valuable Player: Brooke Buckner, who went 40-18 with a 68.97% points won percentage for the regular season champs Las Vegas.
• Challenger League 2025 Most Improved Player: James Delgado, who went 35-20 in his first ever MLP season.

Quick Playoff Structure Primer

San Diego featured the first two rounds of playoffs for both Premier and Challenger. For Premier, that meant two round of 16 events and then the full quarter finals, while in Challenger that meant two quarter finals and the semifinals. At the end of the weekend, the league thus held exactly 10 “matches” between teams to determine who would be flying to NYC for next week’s finals. The opening round matchups in both leagues were a standard MLP match (two gender doubles, two mixed doubles, and a DreamBreaker to break a tie), while the latter rounds for both leagues were a best 2 out of 3 match format, with teams playing each other multiple times across the weekend.

One additional wrinkle: MLP allows its top seeds to choose which team they will play in each round. This came into play in a huge way in San Diego, as we’ll discuss in a moment.

Premier Playoffs Recap

Day 1 Observations/Round of 16

• Round of 16: No. 7 Texas Ranchers gets Alshon back, and Devilliers’ great play drags No. 10 Miami into the DreamBreaker, but the Ranchers prevail 21-19 in a match they should have more easily won to advance.
• Round of 16: Despite losing star Dylan Frazier to injury, sub Goldin more than adequately replaced him as No. 8 Orlando cruised to an easy 3-1 win over No. 9 Utah. Utah has to be disappointed in this result given how well they played in the season’s final event.

Day 2 & 3 Observations/Quarterfinals

No. 1 St. Louis “chose” the lowest seeded team in No. 8 Orlando, but then the shocker: No. 2 Dallas Flash, the defending champs and the mid-season tournament winners, purposely chose No. 5 Columbus Sliders instead of the lower ranked options (namely, Texas). Rumors had swirled about dissention amongst the Columbus Slider’s ranks, perhaps leading to the Flash’ decision. Perhaps this was Dallas’ players being over-confident and overly clever. Columbus gave Dallas one of their only losses on the season, and clearly was a stronger opponent than No. 7 Texas, so the decision was curious. Dallas’ staff was quoted as saying that the players took a vote and selected Columbus, but the move seemed to immediately backfire as the Sliders’ veteran roster was more than a little fired up.

With No. 7 Texas on the table, No. 3 New Jersey said, “thank you very much” and selected the Ranchers, leaving No. 4 Brooklyn to deal with the Ben Johns-led No. 6 LA Mad drops in the quarterfinal round. Here’s how the matches went.

• Quarters Match-up 1; No. 1 St. Louis picks Orlando and immediately stream rolls them in the first match of their series 3-0. In Match 2, Orlando’s women shocked Bright & Fahey to open, but STL got down to business from there, advancing into the semis with a 3-1 win. Patriquin and Tardio went a combined 7-0 to power the Shock into NYC.
• Quarters Match-up 2: Dallas inexplicably picks the more talented Columbus roster, and is immediately tested. JW loses both his matches and the defending champs are stretched to a DreamBreaker, where they prevail 21-19 to open the series with a close win. In Match 2, the two teams had the exact same four doubles results as in the first match, but this time Columbus broke open a close DreamBreaker to race to a 21-14 win and force game 3 on Sunday. In Match 3: Dallas’ choice of opponents led to the only decisive third match of a quarter final series, and this was the final match played of the weekend. Columbus came out on fire and won both gender matches 11-4, but Dallas clawed back both Mixed to send the last match of the playoff round to the DreamBreaker. Columbus broke out an early lead, but Dallas came back despite some bad challenge decisions costing them a point, and it looked as if Columbus would choke. As it turned out, the choking was to be at the hands of Dallas’ lefty Ge, who lost three points at 18-18 in a row to CJ Klinger to give Columbus the 21-18 shocking upset win and a spot in the semis.
• Quarters Match-up 3: New Jersey laughed all the way to the winner’s circle, unexpectedly getting the far weaker Texas team as their 1st round opponent. They cruised to a 3-0 match 1 win. In Match 2: After sweeping gender doubles, NJ looked like it was going to go undefeated in the round, but Texas had other ideas. The Ranchers took both mixed matches as Alshon and his coach Leigh Waters got into it on the sidelines to push it to a DreamBreaker. There, NJ’s superior singles firepower made it a laugher 21-13 as they move on to the Semis.
• Quarters Match-Up 4: Despite Brooklyn finally getting Dekel Bar back, Ben Johns looks like he’s laser-focused with two dominant wins enroute to a 3-0 opening match sweep. In Match 2: Ben Johns took over in both doubles matches and Jade beat Jackie in the Kawamoto-vs-Kawamoto mixed match as LA cruised into the semis. Johns finished this match 4-0 with an astounding 77.19% points won percentage to lead all players for the weekend.

With these results, your semis will be No. 1 St. Louis, No. 3 New Jersey, No. 5 Columbus, and No. 6 LA Mad Drops. We won’t know the matchups until closer to next weekend, but there seems to be little chance St. Louis will pick the Ben Johns-led LA Mad Drops. –

Challenger Playoffs Recap

Day 1/Quarter finals observations

• Quarters: No. 3 California blasts the last place No. 6 Florida Smash 3-0 to send them home quickly.
• Quarters: No. 5 Bay Area picks up Truong to replace Querry again, and they grind out a close win over rival No. 4 DC, who had dominated them all season.

Day 2/Semi-final Observations

• Semis Match-up 1: A focused No. 1 Las Vegas opened up their semis series against the upstart No. 5 Bay Area Breakers with a straight-forward 3-1 win. In Match 2, Las Vegas continued the onslaught, this time sweeping Bay Area 3-0 to move into the finals with relative ease.
• Semis Match-up 2: California may have swept the final event, but Nashville blasted them in the opener behind two Erokhina wins (filling in for the recently retired Esquivel). In Match 2: California’s men tried to make it interesting, but Nashville tightened up to sweep Mixed and secure a spot in the final.

With these results, we will have the two top Challenger teams playing for all the marbles in NYC next weekend. It’s only fitting since these two teams were heads and shoulders better than the rest of Challenger, and Las Vegas vs Nashville was the final of the Mid-season Beer City Open tournament. The winner moves up to Premier; the loser stays around with the scrubs, making next weekend a very compelling match.

Player Standings/Stats Analysis for the Weekend

In Premier

• As noted above, Ben Johns was by far the most dominant player this weekend, winning 77% of his points across four matches. A motivated Johns in MLP is a scary thing to see. For those of you not familiar with his MLP history, his team won the 2021 inaugural title, he won two of the 2023 events while on Seattle (and lost in the 2023 Season 1 super Final), then won the 2023 Season 2 super final with Chicago.
• Andrei Daescu put in some work this weekend, going 5-1 against Dallas’ No. 1 doubles teams to help Columbus with the shocking win.
• With all due respect to Dekel’s capabilities, it looked like he wasn’t ready to return; he won just 22% of his points while going 0-4 in Doubles as Brooklyn was 2-and-out.

In Challenger

• No real surprises here: three of the four Las Vegas players were top of the table, with 2025 Most Improved Player James Delgado winning more than 80% of his points in Las Vegas’ win.
• A solid weekend for Nashville’s Genie Erokhina, who went 4-0 with a 72% points won clip.

What did we learn this weekend?

What were our top three Takeaways from the competition this weekend?

1. Dallas blew it. Nuff said.
2. LA Mad Drops are going to be a tough out.
3. Columbus certainly showed what can happen when you fire up a team needlessly.

Media Pick’ Em Contest Update

MLP Super-Fan Matty Pickles (aka Matt Klitch) runs a season-long Media MLP Pick’em Contest on Twitter, where all the pundits in the sport are participating. Here’s how we did this week, and where we stand overall.

Summary: I gave up a couple of points to my closest rivals and maintain just a 2-point lead atop the standings, but my closest rivals and I have the same finals and champions picks, so I may not be catchable for the title.

Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, the six teams advancing from San Diego fly to NYC for the big finals weekend.

MLP-specific stats mentioned herein come from PickleKey.com, which has done a great job collecting detailed MLP player data for the league.

Any Tour-level match stats quoted in this article are courtesy of PickleWave. Visit picklewave.com for the premier source of Pro Pickleball data, including match replays, highlights, stats, and discussion. PickleWave has more than 22,000 matches in its database across all the pro tours.