Favorites Advance At A Tense And Energetic Major League Pickleball Playoffs Round One In Dallas

Major League Pickleball (MLP), presented by DoorDash, headed back to Dallas and the awesome Pickler Universe facility, for the first round of the 2026 playoffs.

Key links for tracking the event this weekend, which feature livestreams from the primary courts at the facility on MLP’s YouTube channel and on PickleballTV.com. I also have data-centric links at the bottom of this recap.

MLP Dallas Playoffs Week 1 Event home page
League Standings__and- __Team/Player Stats
MLP 2026 Schedule__along with- __Rosters for the 20 Premier League Teams

Power Rankings versus Season Finish

Just before the playoffs kicked off, I revisited beginning of the season Power rankings and compared how teams ended up. It ended up being long enough to make its own post: enjoy it here.

Round of 16 Opponent Draft Results

Ahead of the event, the 5th - 8th finishing teams “drafted” their first round playoff opponents. This is a critical step, and one which led famously to a massive upset in the 2025 playoffs when Dallas picked Columbus instead of a lesser team and was subsequently beat.

This year, the teams picked in order of their finish; the top 4 teams had byes this round, and here is how the playoff matchups were picked:

No. 5 Brooklyn picked No. 10 SoCal Hard Eights
No. 6 Dallas picked the No 11 Las Vegas Night Owls
No. 7 Palm Beach picked No. 12 Chicago Slice
No 8 Texas was left with No. 9 Atlanta

So, some interesting selections here.

SoCal, despite finishing tied with Las Vegas, was the first team picked likely due to their top male Armaan Bhatia suffering a significant knee injury at their last event. They are reeling from a poor showing at their final regular season event and will have to regroup. Brooklyn swept SoCal 4-0 in their only meeting in Week 3. Brooklyn has yet to play 100% full strength since the Rohrabacher-scoreboard incident, and they’re not serious title contenders unless they have all four starters playing.

Dallas then picked Las Vegas instead of the lower ranked Chicago, a gutsy play considering that the Night Owls just went 3-2 in Orlando with a win over Brooklyn in group play. Did Dallas just overthink their playoff opponent once again? Dallas beat Las Vegas twice in the regular season, including a 4-0 sweep two weeks ago in Chicago, but Las Vegas is a much better team than Chicago, so look out for another “They didn’t believe in us” situation to unfold.

Palm Beach opted for the Cinderella team of Chicago as opposed to the much tougher option Atlanta, as one might expect. The two teams only met once this season, and it was just a couple days ago in Orlando, where Chicago had match points in the DreamBreaker before falling. This could be closer than one may expect.

That left the 8/9 matchup between Texas and Atlanta as the most competitive of the weekend. Atlanta beat Texas 3-2 in Austin Week 4 in their only meeting.

Premier League Round of 16 Recaps

Matchup No. 1: No. 5 seed Brooklyn picked No. 10 SoCal Hard Eights

Match 1: After weeks of their starters missing matches, Brooklyn was back at full strength, with Rohrabacher joining Kawamoto for Women’s doubles. SoCal didn’t care, with Dizon/Campbell grinding out a 12-10 win to put Brooklyn surprisingly down early. Rohrabacher definitely looked rusty after so much time away, and Brooklyn is in a hole. Alshon & Newman made fast work of SoCal’s undermanned men’s team to even the match and send things to Mixed. After easily winning Mixed-1, Newman & Jackie had match point on their paddles but couldn’t finish, and amazingly SoCal’s youngsters Campbell and Mackinnon saved six match points to came back to shock Brooklyn 12-10 and force the DreamBreaker. In the DB, The first turn of men was dead even, as was the first ladies turn, then Kawamoto gave Brooklyn a 2 point lead heading to the top of the order. Rafa Lenhard dominated Alshon to tie it at 10, then MacKinnon held Haworth for 12-12. The 16yr old Campbell got a 3-1 rotation over singles specialist Blatt to give SoCal the lead... then Kawamoto once again saves Brooklyn with her sneaky good singles game to even it at 15-15. At the start of turn three ... all even, 16-16. Alshon somehow evens things up against the dominant Lenard for 18-18, handing things to the #1 singles player Haworth. Mackinnon wins the first point and had a wide open court for a chance at a match point and blew it ... somehow its a 2-2 rotation with multiple errors. Here we are; 20-20. A net-cord winner from Blatt results in a match point for Brooklyn but its saved. Blatt hooks in a forehand for another match point opportunity, but Campbell wins an amazing rally for 22-22. Crazy. Kawamoto wrong-foots Dizon for another match point... then a long baseline rally ends with another Jackie passing shot that wrong-foots Dizon for the win 24-22. Wow. What a start to this series.
Match 2: Brooklyn has gone back to load management with Rohrabacher, and has Blatt inserted into doubles with Jackie Kawamoto to start; this will give SoCal a fighting chance to get deeper into this match. Unsurprisingly, Dizon & Campbell took advantage of this situation to win Women’s 11-4 and give SoCal another fighting chance. It didn't last long: Brooklyn's men both cruised to two wins each, and Brooklyn moves on with a comfortable 3-1 win.

Matchup No. 2: No. 6 seed Dallas picked the No 11 Las Vegas Night Owls

Match 1: Townsend and Truong got off to a hesitant start, showing some nerves and going down 5-1 early before tying the opening game up. Then, after a blatant double hit call was missed by the refs, Townsend lost focus just long enough to cost them the game. JW and Ge had to dig very deep to even the match 13-11, but then Dallas’ strength took over, blasting Atlanta's two mixed teams to win the first match 3-1.
Match 2: After sleepwalking through much of yesterday’s match, Dallas blew the doors off of Las Vegas today, with JW giving up 3 points in two games to secure the only sweep of the weekend and to send Dallas into the next round.

Matchup No. 3: No. 7 seed Palm Beach picked No. 12 Chicago Slice

Match 1: the opening match of the weekend, and was close from the get-go. PBR’s Pisnik/Sewing, dominant all year, were pressed by Hendershot/Wei before winning 12-10. Diamond is the starter this match, with Tyson McGuffin on the bench as PBR goes with the hot hand, and Diamond delivers, playing on the left with Bar and dominating to a 11-5 win to get Palm Beach up 2-0. Goins stayed hot with Wei in Mixed-1, leaving it to Mixed-2, where Chicago nearly pushed it to a DB and made PBR save six match points before clinching.
Match 2: PBR started out as expected with a strong Sewing/Pisnik win, but Navratil roared as he and Goins evened the match with emotion. That left it to mixed, where the PBR teams labored past Chicago’s youngsters in two close mixed matches to win 3-1 and move onto the next round. There was definitely no love lost here between the veteran Navratil and the Palm Beach team in general, somewhat out of character for the head of the player’s union.

Matchup No. 4: No 8 seed Texas was left with No. 9 Atlanta.

Match 1: Atlanta's veteran team came out firing and surprisingly swept gender doubles against Texas. Jansen & Oncins crushed Mixed-1, while Christian and Acevedo squeaked out Mixed-2 12-10 to force a DB. There, Texas' superior DB squad cruised to the win, jumping out to a 7-1 lead and never looking back, winning 21-14 to secure the first match in the series.
Match 2: Once again, Atlanta’s women’s team of Irvine & Humberg dominated for the opening win. However, Oncins/Acevedo came roaring back, breaking a 2-game losing streak against the Atlanta Men’s pair with a solid 11-5 win to even the match up and give the huge advantage to Texas going into Mixed. Oncins & Jansen dominated Mixed-1 11-4, putting Atlanta down to its last chance to keep their 2026 season alive. Devilliers & Irvine came through with an 11-6 mixed-2 win to send this series to a 2nd DreamBreaker in a row. In the DB, Atlanta’s underdog singles squad held firm somehow through the whole first rotation, but Atlanta's firepower came out in force, winning 10 straight points to blow open a 10-8 DB to 18-8, then finished it off 21-11 for the win.

Player Stats Analysis for the Weekend

Here’s a quick look at the players who played best (and worst) this weekend.

Brooklyn’s Alshon was the star of the weekend, going and leading the regulars with a 77.2% points won record. JW Johnson wasn’t far behind for 2nd.
The best DreamBreaker record for the weekend? Jackie Kawamoto, who went 8-2 to keep her team alive.
Rafa Lenhard was the worst player in his four doubles matches … but impressed this observer greatly with his stellar play in the DreamBreaker against Alshon.

What did we learn this weekend?

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

Palm Beach’s two-match sweep wasn’t very convincing, and I have to think they’ll be New Jersey’s opponent in the next round.
Brooklyn is still not 100%, and that may have them getting picked a bit earlier in the next round’s opponent draft.
Unsurprisingly, Dallas looked the strongest of the four advancers and will probably get a match against 4th seed Columbus for their troubles, which would be fitting after what happened in the 2025 playoffs.

Media Pick’ Em Contest Update

We have a slew of influencers and members of the traditional pickleball media participating in a season-long pick’em contest. Here’s the link to track the competition online, and I’ll be tweeting out the pick matrix and updates, so __follow me on Twitter __if interested.

MLP Media Pick’em Competition Weekly Summary:

My prop bets turned out great: Palm Beach’s men beat Chicago’s men by exactly 1 point, and Texas’ men beat Atlanta’s men by two. The biggest miss on the weekend was Texas sweeping Atlanta, which most of us missed. Winners on the weekend included Alex Lantz, Nico the Lefty, and yours truly, who tied at the top. Season leader Shields comes in last, but still clings to the lead.

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

Next up for the MLP is round 2 of the playoffs from Newport Beach. We also had both an APP event and a PPA Asia event last week, which we’ll recap tomorrow. August is super busy, with a ton of international events and the finishing of the MLP season.

MLP-specific stats mentioned herein come from PickleKey.com, which has done a great job collecting detailed MLP player data for the league and went through an off-season re-design that includes a slew of new ways to slice and dice the data.

My colleague Erik Tice at the Dink (who does double duty as the GM for the California Black Bears) is back to maintaining his Public MLP Data sheet, which has all sorts of awesome data.

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 31,000 matches in its database across all the pro tours.