New Jersey Finishes Off The 2026 Major League Pickleball Season With Its First League Title

Semi-Finals Playoff Recaps

Matchup No. 1: No. 1 New Jersey 5’s vs No. 5 Brooklyn Pickleball Team

• Playoffs Semis Match 1: NJ and ALW came out firing, blowing away Brooklyn’s women 11-2 to open the match. NJ continued to dominate in Mens, jumping out to a 7-0 lead. Brooklyn came all the way back as the crowd exploded. NJ dug in, ground out some great defense to stop Brooklyn in their tracks, then ran off the last three points to get the 11-8 win and put NJ up 2-0. Interestingly, ALW/Khlif were not set for Mixed-1, but it didn’t matter, as Staksrud/Johnson cruised to the win in mixed 11-6 to sweep Brooklyn in the opener.
• Playoffs Semis Match 2: With their backs against the wall, Brooklyn’s ladies came out … flat, losing to the very motivated ALW/Jorja team 11-1. Alshon & Newman held firm but lost to Howells & Fed in a close one that ended on a controversial point penalty at the end, really putting Brooklyn’s back against the walls. In mixed-1, NJ flipped the order and put ALW/Khlif first, and Rachel/Alshon were just too error prone to take advantage of the matchups, losing 11-4 for a sweep.

Matchup No. 2: No. 2 St. Louis Shock vs No. 6 Dallas Flash

• Match 1: Playoffs Semis Match 1: STL and Dallas kicked off the weekend with the first match just after noon on Friday. STL’s women dominated early and often, taking advantage of the Dallas errors and cruising to an 11-1 opener. Dallas immediately returned the favor, with Johnson going on a tear to beat the STL Men 11-5 to even things up. The center court is almost perfectly aligned east to west, meaning there’s a real “sun court” to deal with; it wasn’t rare to see teams quickly go down when looking into the sun during play. in Mixed-1, STL cruised to a 6-0 lead, but a series of errors from Dallas led to an easy win for STL 11-2 as Bright goes 22-3 for the day. Needing a win in Mixed-2, Townsend and Ge played well, but not well enough and lost 11-6 to give StL a 1-0 lead.
• Playoffs Semis Match 2: STL’s Anna Bright picked right up where she left off, destroying Dallas’ ladies 11-2 to open match 2 and go for the semifinals victory before the sun even sets on Friday in NYC. JW and Ge took out Patriquin and Tardio for the second time on the day to even up the match, sending things to Mixed once again. In Mixed1, JW and Brooke tightened it up but couldn’t overcome Bright * Hayden, losing 11-9 to put the season on the line for Mixed-2 and their mid-season trade acquisition Townsend. Dallas did their best, but they couldn’t top Fahey & Tardio, losing 11-8 and the match.

Finals Playoff Recaps

Matchup No. 1: No. 1 New Jersey 5’s vs No. 2 St. Louis Shock

• Playoff Finals Match 1: STL came out firing, jumping to a 6-1 lead over the 33-1 ALW/Jorja team, who started looking into the sun. After switching sides, STL continued their dominance, taking advantage of netted drive errors from Jorja and pressing-errors from ALW as she tried to get involved, and STL shocked NJ 11-2 to open. Just as quickly as STL jumped over NJ in women’s, did the NJ men jump ahead of STL 4-1 … then the talk started. Hayden saying that Howells “was their guy” after an error, then Staksrud pointing at a spot int he Kitchen after Hayden missed a dink, telling his regular PPA doubles partner “that’s where im’ going;” At 2-5 down, STL gets two stops staring into the sun, and thus began the come back. Patriquin and Tardio, who had yet to win together this weekend, somehow turned the tied and beat the NJ men to give STL a shocking 2-0 lead and what was surely a match 1 victory . NJ had other things to say: ALW and Khlif, after struggling so badly in the Qtf round against Palm beach, cruised to an 11-4 win, then Fed & Jorja took care of business 11-8 to send us to the first DreamBreaker of the weekend. In the DB, STL was firmly in control for much of it, as Fahey shocked ALW with a 3-1 turn and Tardio (in for the DB for the first time this season for STL) dominated his counterpart Howells to help give STL an 18-15 lead at one point. Then Fed took over, winning 3 straight against Hunter to even it. After a 2-2 turn tied the match dead square at 20-20 NJ handed the ball to ALW … and she delivered, winning two solid points against the 2nd best singles player in the land in Fahey to secure the match for NJ 22-20. They snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat and had no business winning today.
• Playoff Finals Match 2: In a complete reversal from yesterday’s results, today it was New Jersey that swept gender doubles, with both teams winning close ones (11-9 and 12-10) to put St. Louis on their back heels. The Shock answered, with Bright & Patriquin dominating ALW & Khlif 11-6 in Mixed-1 and then Fahey & Tardio holding on for an 11-9 win to send us to another DreamBreaker. Unfortunately for the fans who wanted more … New Jersey dominated the DreamBreaker from the get-go. Both Howells and Waters turned in 3-1 turns to start, but it was Staksrud blanking Hunter Johnson 4-0 that put the match out of reach. At that point NJ had a 14-6 lead and it was just a matter of time. ALW got another 3-1 turn, and it was over. 21-9 beat down for the title. Staksrud is deservedly named the Finals MVP.

Player Stats Analysis for the Weekend

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

• In a testament to how closely matched NJ and STL are, no play went undefeated this weekend, not even the top players for the top teams. Bright & Fahey, thanks to their dominating performances in the semis, lead the weekend in points percentage at 64%.
• Patriquin and Tardio each went just 4-4 for the weekend and struggled as a Men’s pair after going 30-4 together in the regular season. It didn’t really factor into their loss, but was still surprising.
• Brooklyn’s ladies got waxed this weekend: Rohrabacher scored just 7 points in three games, and Jackie Kawamoto didn’t fare much better.

What did we learn this weekend?

What were our top Takeaways from the competition this weekend?

1. NYC and this venue make for such an amazing host. MLP has to figure out how to get more seating and more fans because the tickets were scarce and expensive.
2. New Jersey stayed firm with their lineup choices and did not get tempted to sit Noe Khlif after his struggles in the quarters. He and ALW still look a loss, but he played significantly better this weekend.
3. I see lots of snippy comments in social media about how STL paid so much money for Bright and still lost, without the corresponding acknowledgement that New Jersey wrote a pretty massive check to get Staksrud for essentially two events and the playoffs. Nonetheless, it was money well spent, as NJ doesn’t win this event without Staksrud’s energy and composure in the finals.
4. MLP was amazing this year. Enough said.

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: The @NmlPickleball guys win the weekend, getting every pick right until the finals, and even then they still had the right team (but the wrong number of games). @Johnny5pointOH was the SOLE pundit to correctly predict the finals winner and match score of NJ 2-0.

Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, we have completed the 2026 MLP Regular Season. MLP will host the 2026 Nations Cup in Dallas ahead of 2026 Worlds, but that event seems to be more about international team play versus MLP team play. With 2027’s competition rules in flux and a slew of top players ending their 3-year contracts with MLP teams, we’ve reached the end of an era for sure, and next year’s teams may look drastically different from what we just witnessed. We likely don’t get any MLP transaction or competition updates for months.

In the meantime, next week kicks off the 2026-27 PPA slate, which I’ll be previewing over the next couple of days in this space.

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.