Pre-Season Power Rankings In Major League Pickleball And Their Relation To Team Payroll

In the first post-merger MLP dispersal draft in April 2024, the twelve teams that bid their way into the initial Premier League had to abide by a salary cap in the draft, and the total value of their four picks could not exceed $1M dollars (or “points” as they were referred to at the time in an attempt to obfuscate the amount of “real” money owners were being asked to contribute).

As soon as the draft was over, Tyson McGuffin (initially drafted by Utah for $290k) demanded a trade, and the team flipped him to Orlando for Jay Devilliers (who Orlando paid just $135k for). Even though Orlando sent back some cash, suddenly the Squeeze had an immediate advantage: their roster was “worth” more than the salary cap dictated just a week prior. With such a small player pool and such small roster sizes, it was impossible to force the two teams to find exact trade partners to make the deal work under the $1M salary cap, so the league had little choice but to accept the deal and give Orlando an oversized roster advantage.

More trades occurred over the years as some teams chose not to pay the renewal fees for players, and rosters quickly became unbalanced. Ben Johns, the most expensive player in the original dispersal draft at an initial $840k acquisition figure (and thus a $420k renewal figure) was traded from Carolina to the LA Mad Drops and instantly rocketed that roster well over the original $1M limit. And, thus started the inevitable progression to where we are in the league today: no salary caps, no limits on the amount spent in the draft, and some pretty significant payroll differences from the top of the league to the bottom of the league.

I power ranked the 20 teams just after the 2026 draft earlier this year, and have now adjusted those ranks given the slew of transactions we’ve seen since. However, when I linked up the keeper fees and draft dollar outlays of the 20 teams and did some XLS work, there were some pretty clear patterns that emerged; there’s almost a direct correlation between a team’s payroll and their power rank, from the best projected teams to the worst.

You may be reading this and saying to yourself, “duh, obviously,” but I still thought it was an interesting topic to detail, plus explain why there are a few outlier teams who seem to break the mold. There’s also some very distinct “tiers” for teams in the 2026 season that are laid bare when power ranking the current rosters and comparing them to their current roster outlay.

At the very least, this data should be something for the league to consider moving forward, as it has become more than clear that there are teams who are clearly trying in MLP, teams who are just getting by, and teams who are not attempting to compete at all.

Note: this analysis was all done prior to the 5/15/26 trade between Dallas and Carolina, where Angie Walker and Samantha Parker swap teams. I do not think this trade changes any of the rankings, but the payroll figures may not be entirely accurate at this point.

First, let’s detail how I arrived at my current power rankings. I individually ranked the Men’s Doubles players, Women’s Doubles players, the Singles players per team, then came up with a weighted average to arrive at the initial overall power ranking. I did not try to add in Mixed doubles rankings, instead trusting that ranking the overall quality of the doubles players should be enough. I then weighted the scores by giving the two doubles components equal weights and then adding a 25% singles team factor (roughly 25% of MLP ties go to DreamBreaker … 92 of 382 matches last season for example) to come up with the below team ranking.

Here’s the four component power rank lists (when there’s an asterisk* that indicates a lefty, though I did not comprehensively assign lefties throughout my xls).

Men’s Doubles Power Ranks Entering 2026 Season

You may quibble with the rankings of in particular teams 3-6 a bit, and you may think I’ve got some of the younger players too low. Fair enough. Also, for some of the lower ranked teams the “bench” player may actually be the starter in some cases; Lenhard has really stepped up lately for example, as has Pham for Bay Area.

Women’s Doubles Power Ranks Entering 2026 Season

My initial reaction after doing these ranks was noting just how high the Palm Beach team will start. Sewing is a relative unknown but has the same level of dominance on the APP that Haworth had before moving over last year, but I could understand if you think that team is overrated as compared to some of the veteran-laden teams just below it.

Men’s Singles Power Ranks Entering 2026 Season

I’m operating under the assumption that teams who have drafted a singles-specialist for their bench are going to use them in DreamBreakers. This is Haworth on Brooklyn, Joseph on the Mad Drops, Crum on Columbus, maybe even Goins on St.Louis since he just made the Tour Finals (though I’m not sure who makes way). I may have Columbus way, way too low here since Daescu no longer plays any singles, but the rise of the singles specialist in the sport makes this a somewhat difficult endeavor.

Women’s Singles Power Ranks Entering 2026 Season

The distribution of the top singles players in the sport is pretty apparent here, with the 8 women who qualified for the Tour Finals distributed amongst the top seven teams ranked here. Las Vegas has an embarrassment of riches, with two of the top 8 ranked singles players right now in Buckner & Wang, plus the 9th ranked player in Truluck who filed in at the Tour Finals when Waters dropped out. I still couldn’t put LV overtop of the Waters-led New Jersey team though; there’s just such a gap between ALW and the rest of the field. As with the men, there’s a few singles-specialists in this group who likely play DreamBreakers instead of their doubles teammates (Bouchard for LA, DiMuzio for Utah).

Put all these ranks together to get an overall power rank:

Overall Pre-season 2026 MLP Team Power Ranks

There are some interesting “tiers” here, based on the way that the data shakes out.

• St. Louis is in a class by itself, despite New Jersey adding Jorja Johnson.
• I’ve got New Jersey and Columbus tied for the #2 spot, giving it to the 5’s as a tie-breaker. But, I find it interesting just how close those two teams are since most conventional wisdom has STL and NJ neck and neck at the top without consideration for anyone else in that #2 spot.
• LA is “right there” at No. 4, but a lot depends on Ben Johns. He’s still being credited as a top singles player despite not really playing for months, and he’s never played a competitive point with his partner-to-be Max Freeman (current PPA Men’s Doubles rank: 30th). Things could go south for LA in a hurry if Johns doesn’t gel with Freeman in the same way he and Hunter failed to really gel last year.
• I’ve got a bit of a gap from LA to Brooklyn, then another gap to Dallas & Orlando, who both remade their rosters and have something of a question mark heading into 2026.
• You have to hand it to Palm Beach; any way you look at it, they were able to put together a top 10 team in the off-season starting from nothing and, as we’ll see in a bit, for not a ton of money.
• There’s a bit of a gap from Texas at #10 to the next two teams (Atlanta and Utah), who both are playoff competitors but who just are not as strong as the teams above them.
• The big drop off starts at #14 with Carolina, and gets worse from there. The bottom seven teams in the league do not seem to have aspirations to compete, and more than a few teenagers now dot these rosters in a clear gambit to get in early on rising talent.
• I see three “tiers of teams here: The teams ranked 1-5 are the title contenders, the teams ranked 6-13 are playoff contenders, and the teams ranked 14-20 are teams who aren’t really trying to win this year. Only 12 teams make the playoffs, so one of these contenders will be left out.

Pairing Payroll with Power Ranks

Lastly, here’s a fun exercise; how does team payroll correlate with these power ranks? I’ve captured the 2026 player retention fee (irrespective of who paid it earlier this year, as we’ve had trades since these fees were paid) as a “payroll” figure for each of the 20 teams and put it side by side with the above power ranks.

Observations and Thoughts

• The two top teams are far and away the biggest payroll teams, to no surprise. STL had to spend more than $1M to get back Anna Bright, while New Jersey broke the bank with $800k for Jorja Johnson.
• Perhaps putting first season pay figures alongside second/third season pay figures skews this analysis. If I re-did these tables with the original acquisition costs for the LA Mad Drops, they’d have a payroll figure of $1.5M, nearly the equal of StL.
• Columbus is an outlier thanks to the ridiculously low payroll figure they’re carrying for C.J. Klinger, who is probably the “Best MLP Value player” in the league for his $1,000 keeper price. I say this with all due respect to the $0 keepers who were initially drafted into the Challenger league or who were outright waiver claims; Jaume Martinez Vich, Chao-Yi Wang, Millie Rane, and Eric Oncins all being in this category.
• Other outliers in the Playoff tier include Atlanta, who has a really low payroll compared to its general area thanks to the $0 Vich, the $30k Devilliers, and the also ridiculously low keeper figure of $5,500 for Irvine. They’ve done a great job trading to build a competitive and affordable team.
• Utah’s roster is interestingly high, considering their historic lack of commitment to spending, thanks to their decision to retain Etta Wright this past off season (at $157k) and then to splash it out for teenage sensation Tama Shimabukuro in the draft for $125k. What looked like a boondoggle on draft day may now be a bargain, as Tama made the singles final and the doubles bronze medal at the Atlanta Slam.
• Chicago had to rebuild their roster from scratch, and had to pay handsomely for it to the tune of more than $300k in the draft. They did not have the luxury of Palm Beach (also in the same boat), who was able to procure unsigned players for a flat fee pre draft, which netted them Sofia Sewing for cheap, Dekel Bar and Tina Pisnik in under-value cash deals, and then let them nab players later in the draft.
• Las Vegas’ roster is filled with its Challenger-level contracted players and is a clear outlier compared to other teams in its area. In fact, the most expensive player on LV’s roster is their Male Bench player Braden Jacobson, who cost them more in the 2026 draft than the rest of their roster combined. That’s crazy.
• From the non-competing tier, there’s a few teams who absolutely spent in the 2026 draft, no shade here. However, SoCal and Phoenix had no one to blame but themselves for having to spend north of $200k to fill their rosters, as they spent the off-season dropping or trading away all their assets purposefully. Phoenix dumped their entire roster at the 2/15/26 keeper deadline, while SoCal had essentially an entire roster of waiver claims and was forced to start over.
• Lastly, in the “no surprise” category, we have the three lowest payroll teams: Miami ($40k), Carolina ($30k), and Florida ($20K). Carolina spent the off-season flipping players and netting cash and cheap veterans and actually has what I think is the “best of the rest” team that may actually sneak into the playoffs. Miami’s GM Johnny Goldberg may be pulling a rabbit out of his hat once again, finding incredibly cheap talent that may actually be a ton better than their price. Florida in 2026 will be what NY and SoCal were last year; a team who will be happy to just get a win at some point in the 2026 season.

The 2026 MLP season kicks off a week from today on 5/22/26 in Dallas.

Any typos or payroll aggregation errors are mine and I apologize in advance. However, if you see an error by all means reach out and I’ll correct. I’ve relied mostly on my own draft artifacts and spreadsheet work, as well as from artifacts provided and maintained by the league, many of which are for Media-eyes only.