St. Louis Wins The Major League Pickleball Regular Season Title and LA Mad Drops Makes Noise In Dallas

Major League Pickleball (MLP), presented by DoorDash, rolled into the 9th of its 10 week season, inexorably grinding to the finish line of the regular season. The tour was in the Dallas Metroplex, specifically at the Pickler Universe in suburb Carrollton for the Advil Targeted relief MLP Dallas 2025 event. For the third week in a row (Beer City’s excitement and then St. Louis’ debut event within an arena), the sentiment is that MLP as a league has set a new bar, with massive crowds and an electric atmosphere inside the club.

The weekend’s slate was a collection of “haves” and “have not” teams in the league: it included the top three teams in the standings (STL, home-team Dallas, and NJ), new-look LA (more on that later), the frisky Texas Ranchers, and then basically the four worst teams in the league playing out the string in Carolina, Phoenix, SoCal, and the last-place NY Hustlers. This made for, in the same weekend, the best collection of matches we’ve seen all year amongst the top teams alongside some of the worst blow-outs of the year.

There were no Challenger teams playing this week; they’ll finish up their season at Event #10 in a week’s time in Salt Lake.

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

The MLP trade deadline for the season was the Monday before this event … and it was a banger. Headlined by the Ben Johns trade, there were twelve separate transactions conducted in this last-minute window, as some teams clearly are waving the white flag for the season, while others are doubling down to push for a title. Here’s a brief summary of all moves team by team (some of these conflate multiple moves):

• Miami traded away Khlif, Rane, getting back youth in Johnson, Ruhl
• New Jersey acquire Khlif to replace Navratil in the starting roster.
• LA got Johns and Etta, then moved Etta for Safdar to balance their roster
• Utah improved their #2 ladies outlook with Etta, moving Erokhina to Nashville.
• Dallas improved their bench, getting former starters Bellamy and Parker
• Orlando upgraded their #2 female with Millie Rane
• DC replaced the injured Auvergne with Hewett for the remainder of the season.
• Nashville replaced the injured Esquivel with Erokhina to keep up pressure on LV.
• Carolina moved the rest of their starting roster (the Emmrich’s) to Miami
• Miami then flipped Martin Emmrich to California for Benitez

At the end of the day, Carolina is left with basically six waiver wire/challenger players to go along with half a million dollars of cash. Miami traded away their two best players and is probably looking at next year. LA could be the favorite going forward, New Jersey probably likes its chances by improving their weakest link, Orlando, and Utah both marginally improved their starting lineups, and Dallas now has a solid bench just in case. All the involved Challenger teams improved a bit, looking to move up on the top dog Las Vegas for the one promotion spot up for grabs.

News and Noteworthy

• MLP extended the Trade Deadline one week, which gave us the dozen or so moves recapped above. This was likely in response to the chaos following the mid-season tourney. There’s just no realistic way for trade talks to materialize during what’s basically a travel day for the entire league.
• On 7/15/25, MLP announces that the MLP challenger league winner will be promoted to Premier, a change from the competition rules discussed up to this point. It’s not clear how the balance of teams would work if there were 17 premier teams and 5 challenger teams, perhaps implying there are some franchise sales in order.

Premier League Recap

Day 1 Observations

• LA’s new lineup kicks off the weekend with a 4-0 win, but it was a lot closer than perhaps pundits thought it would be against last place NY.
• Carolina’s new-look squad hung in decently, but fell to SoCal as expected 3-1. This was SoCal’s sole win on the weekend, powered once again by Most Improved Player candidate Blaine Hovenier.

Day 2 Observations

• St Louis took on the La Mad Drops in an interesting match with playoff implications. The Women’s Doubles tie was one of the best games I’ve ever seen, between two of the best women’s teams in the sport. Back and forth, amazing defense, saved game points for both sides, hands battles and resets, everything.. St Louis came out on top to set the tone. Next in Men’s Doubles, The Shock blew out to an 8-2 lead before Johns finally caught fire and led the comeback. With Johns covering 90% of the court, the teenagers held firm and won 11-6 for a 2-0 lead. In Mixed, it seems like the LA #1 team matched up with STL’s #2 team and raced to an early 6-0 lead. STL wasn’t done though, with Tardio’s fast hands leading to 8 unanswered points to take nan 8-6 lead. they eventually win 11-8 to go up 3-0 and win the tie. STL finished off a big statement by taking the last for the 4-0 sweep to avenge an earlier loss to LA in Daytona.
• NY stiffened up against SoCal and outlasted them in the DreamBreaker for a rare win. It was their only win of the weekend.
• LA established itself in the current pecking order by sweeping its close rival Texas 4-0 as the new-look lineup begins to gel.

Day 3 Observations

• Everyone circled the NJ vs LA match, an incredibly rare opportunity for the sports’ two best players to meet. NJ fired first, with ALW and Dizon crushing LA’s top Women’s team in a surprising result. Ben dominated the second match, running off 11 unanswered after going 0-6 down by essentially playing 2-on-1. In just the 4th ever Mixed MLP meeting between the two top players of the sport (H/T to Eric Tice by way of PickleKey), ALW and Howells exposed CP and cruised to a Mixed #1 win. Then, with their backs to the wall, NJ’s Mixed #2 returned the favor, exposing Dizon to push the match to the DreamBreaker. In the DreamBreaker, Khlif neutralized Ben Johns, going 6-6 against him while ALW crushed CP 9-1 to counter Hunter’s heroic efforts, but really LA just fell too far behind to really catch up in a rally scoring format. it was 22-20 in NJ’s favor in the end, probably a match LA thought they’d win.
• In the Saturday night premier match, host Dallas’ top ladies pair dominated the opener before Texas’ Oncins & Alshon cruised to a win to tie the match heading into Mixed. There, Dallas eked out two close Mixed wins to take the tie 3-1. This is much closer than Dallas likely wanted, and is a possible 2-7 quarter final preview based on the teams’ current ranks that could be dicey come playoff time.

Day 4 Observations

• Phoenix showed just how weak NY is by sweeping them as the 14th place team.
• LA certainly gelled together as a team over the weekend, going from a 4-0 defeat to STL to a DreamBreaker win over 2nd place Dallas to finish off the weekend and send a message to the league.
• What a way to finish perhaps the best MLP event we’ve had to date; a thrilling comeback DB win for league regular season champion St. Louis over 3rd place New Jersey.

Team Standings Update post Event

Here’s the teams who made moves up or down the Standings in this event.

In Premier

• St Louis clinched the regular season championship before the weekend was done, and finishes the season 24-1. Dallas finishes 2nd by a fair distance to the next group of teams.
• The LA Mad Drops did not make up any ground in the standings, coming into the weekend 6th and finishing 6th. Not bad considering the gauntlet of matches they had to play. They lost to 1st and 3rd place, but beat 2nd place Dallas, and will be a nightmare in the playoffs.
• Carolina went 0-6 this weekend to drop from 11th to 15th. New York finishes the season in dead last, having gone just 4-21 this season and being thankful there’s no relegation.

What did we learn this weekend?

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

1. LA got better as the weekend went along, losing to STL 4-0 on Friday, then beating Dallas 3-2 by Sunday. A motivated Ben Johns is good for the sport, even if the trade to LA seemed a little contrived.
2. The Dallas Pickler Universe facility was fantastic for pickleball, and having the top teams all in action led to half a dozen marquee matches for the home fans. No indoor issues this week for Johns, now playing for a good team.
3. St. Louis is going to be tough to beat in the playoffs. In Beer City I thought Dallas might go undefeated for the season, but now its STL that looks like the juggernaut.

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: This was the hardest week yet to predict, since we were all just guessing how well the new Ben Johns-led LA Mad Drops would perform. I only hit on 4 of the 8 picks this week, but got a bonus point for my “lock” of the weekend and netted 5 points. However the race is tightening; 2nd place Jim Kloss missed on his lock but otherwise went 7-8 in his picks to climb within 3 points of the lead.

Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule …

Next up for the MLP? Their next event is ….

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.