Dallas Flash Continue Their Unbeaten Run At Major League Pickleball Arizona Event

There’s no rest for the weary. Major League Pickleball (MLP) presented by DoorDash picked up just a few days after its exciting Austin event and headed west to the (infamous?) Arizona Athletic Grounds for the 4th Stop in its 2025 season. I say “infamous” because this host site is the basis of a $280M fraud lawsuit against its owners. It’s a massive facility, with dozens of courts and has hosted a slew of pro events across all three tours over the years, and one can only hope the facility survives the legalities.

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

No transactions were announced, but there is a major personnel issue covered in the News section. The next waiver period for both Premier and Challenger is in mid-June, just a couple weeks away.

Bench Players who got in on the action this weekend, either by choice or due to player conflicts, included:

– Utah played Erokhina as its Women’s #2 instead of Safdar.

– SoCal played both its bench players Hovenier & newly acquired Ingram in place of Bellamy and Tereschenko to start the event before Irina took over for Match day No. 2. Hovenier played the whole weekend and may have opened some eyes with his play.

– Phoenix replaced Genie Bouchard with Alex Walker early, but then Bouchard was back in action by Friday.

– Atlanta subbed in Rettger for DiMuzio towards the end of the weekend.

Hopefully I didn’t miss any player subs, but it is definitely interesting to see how much these teams are using their bench players.

News and Noteworthy

Ahead of the event, here’s some news and noteworthy items for MLP.

– Just ahead of the event on 5/29/25: UPA fines and suspends Quang Duong for playing in an unsanctioned (and clearly unapproved) event while traveling to Vietnam to support his new paddle sponsor. This will cost him $50k, one PPA event, and most of the upcoming MLP Phoenix event. He’s replaced for the first four games of MLP Arizona by onsite sub Spencer Smith.

Premier League Recap

Day 1 Observations

• Brooklyn swept their mixed matches en route to a 3-1 win over the depleted LA team, without Duong due to today’s suspension.
• Utah’s veterans ground out three wins after dropping the opener to upset Atlanta and get their first win of the season. In my Media Pick’em contest, I got this one wrong by badly underestimating Utah’s team.
• Dallas cruised by SoCal 3-1, though the Hard Eight’s two bench players Hovenier & Ingram got a game win against Dallas’ #2 Mixed team.

Day 2 Observations

• Phoenix squeaked out a 3-2 DreamBreaker that meant just a little bit more to Sock, who took motivation from an off-handed comment about his abilities. Unfortunately, it would be their only win of the weekend.
• Brooklyn kept the games close, but Dallas cruised to sweep the first three games before dropping Mixed #2 in the match of the weekend. This ended up being Brooklyn’s only loss in Arizona.
• Utah was on fire, blasting the listless Phoenix team in the first three games before dropping the meaningless final. Another miss in the Pick-em contest for yours truly here.

Day 3 Observations

• Dallas blasted the bottom-dwelling Utah team to open Saturday, and Jorja continues to absolutely dominate on the court with two 11-2 wins.
• Atlanta cruised past their fellow Challenger promoted team in SoCal, winning the first three games to secure the tie. It would be their only win this weekend.
• Dallas is beatable; they dropped a game. But they still remain undefeated for the season with a 3-1 dispatching of the hosts.

Day 4 Observations

• SoCal finally gets a win, embarrassing the hosts with two dominant gender doubles wins and then holding on with super sub Hovenier the leading the way.
• The reinstated Duong helped LA to a 4-0 sweep of newly-promoted Atlanta to finish the weekend 4-2.
• One last drubbing for Phoenix, losing 4-0 to Brooklyn in the weekend’s final event, may have their GM questioning their curious off-season moves.

Team Standings Update post Event

Note: all standings are done by points-per-match.

In Premier

• Despite going 6-0 for the weekend and improving to 14-0 for the season, Dallas remains in 2nd place by two one-hundredths of a point behind St. Louis.
• Brooklyn’s 5-1 weekend jumps them to 4th place, a few percentage points ahead of Texas.
• Utah got a huge jump up, going from 15th to 9th with a bunch of solid wins.
• Phoenix slumped to 14th overall, and now sits just 3-11 this season.
• SoCal got a win; I did not think they would all season. If they finish the season 1-24 I wouldn’t be shocked.

Player Standings/Stats Analysis for the Weekend:

In Premier

• Jorja Johnson had another amazing weekend, winning more than 70% of her points and going 11-1 in games. She now has won 73% of her points for the season.
• JW Johnson and Rachel Rohrabacher finished 2-3 in the points won rankings, both getting close to the 2/3rds figure with 65% each.
• Atlanta’s Todd Fought went just 1-11 in games this weekend. Phoenix’ Genie Bouchard was nearly as bad, going 1-10 as her team struggled all weekend.
• The low man on the “points won percentage” table went to Rachel Rettger, who in limited action won just 25% of her points in this event.

What did we learn this weekend?

Here’s a new section we’re going to include going forward. Given the league structure and the varying attendance of teams at each event, here’s some specific takeaways from the event.

1. Dallas is unstoppable. Between Jorja Johnson’s leap forward improvement and the team’s overall chip on their shoulder from last year, they’re clearly the team to beat in 2025. Last year this team went through the motions a couple of times and dropped matches against inferior teams, which led to the No. 3 seed in the playoffs and a harder path to the title. This year they’re collectively gunning for an undefeated season.

2. Utah is better than I thought. I had Utah 13th of 16 after the draft (my other pundits generally had them 11-12th). This placed them behind the likes of Carolina, Atlanta, and Phoenix. They’re clearly better than all three of these teams right now, though probably not good enough to get into the playoffs unless they can beat the likes of LA (who they lost to 3-1 last weekend) or Chicago.

3. Phoenix is a lot worse than I thought. Just one win this weekend, over Atlanta, and they inexplicably lost to SoCal, who I legitimately thought was going to go 0-25 this season. Phoenix has absolutely no reason to be this bad, not with top players like McGuffin and Irvine who are getting results week-in/week-out on the PPA. What this says to me is that the Flames GM really, really overestimated the capabilities of Sock and especially Bouchard, and may not have understood the chemistry issues they were acquiring with Tyson. I had Phoenix 8th in my pre-season ranks, well ahead of where my fellow pundits had them ranked (10th-11th mostly, with Kloss having them 13th).

Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule they’re off to Daytona Beach for the third of three back to back MLP events next weekend. Teams in action next weekend include New York, Utah, 1st place St. Louis, LA, and New Jersey. Also back will be SoCal, Texas, Chicago, and the Carolina Hogs, who shouldn’t have any lighting issues this time around since it’s being held at the frequent pro tour hosting facility Pictona in Holly Hill.

All 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.

Also, a great thanks to The Dink’s Erik Tice, who maintains a fantastic MLP detailed data breakdown and makes it publicly available at this Google XLS link. Tice’s data has proved invaluable this year as MLP does not make match data available at this detailed level at present.