11連勝でも4位、ダラスが晒したMLPの残酷な算数

On the final day of the Chicago event in Major League Pickleball (MLP), the US pro team league, the Dallas Flash beat the Brooklyn Pickleball Team on July 26, 2026. That made 11 straight wins and a second consecutive Super Sunday belt. Yet Dallas finished the regular season in fourth and is projected to end up sixth, Pickleball.com writes. The points table that keeps a team from climbing however long it keeps winning is the part anyone designing a team league in Japan should read before the match action.

This is a different match from the Columbus one

This site has already covered the match in which Dallas beat the Columbus Sliders (Revenge a year in the making in the same city, as Dallas beats rival Columbus). This time theopponent and the event are both different: this was the final of MLP Chicago, held July 23 to 26 in Northbrook, Illinois, against Brooklyn. Both may look like Dallas settling a score, but the substance differs, so they should not be confused. The venue was Life Time's North Shore facility, and the scale of capital US fitness majors are putting into pickleball courts has been covered separately (Life Time's 28-Court Behemoth Takes US Facility Investment to Another Level）。

Four events split 2-2, and the match goes to the DreamBreaker

An MLP match is contested over four events, women's doubles, men's doubles and two mixed doubles, and a 2-2 tie sends it to a fifth, the DreamBreaker. On the day, Dallas took women's doubles and the second mixed, while Brooklyn took men's doubles and the first mixed. Brooklyn's wins came from Rachel Rohrabacher and Christian Alshon; Dallas's second mixed went to Daniel Townsend and Augie Ge.

JW Johnson set the tone at the start of the DreamBreaker, pushing through a 4-0 rotation against Chris Haworth, the PPA Tour's top-ranked men's singles player.Shutting down the highest-ranked singles player early turned straight into the points gap. Dallas closed it out 21-10 and banked 25 standard points for the second week running.

Earlier this season the same opponent had dragged Dallas into a Dream Breaker at MLP New York and come back from 19-11 down to win it. Same format, and this time Dallas answered with an 11-point margin.

Townsend in three events, and the system that uses all six players

この試合で目立ったのはオーストラリアのタウンゼンドだ。ダブルス2試合を勝ち、ドリームブレイカーではジャッキー・カワモトから決着の1点を奪った。本人は「アメリカにいられて最高だし、それを最大限に生かしている」と話し、自分はまだ毎日うまくなっている、観客の存在が支えになる、という趣旨も語っている。

One player can appear in three events because, from 2026, the split between starters and substitutes disappeared and all six players on a roster became eligible. The four sent out for the Dream Breaker can also be picked freely, two men and two women, regardless of doubles substitutions. The design lets a team funnel the day’s playing time to whoever is in form. We have written before about how one ace cannot carry a team competition (11-1 even for the world's best: what Ben Johns' rout says about the limits of a single ace), and on this day the reverse applied:a system that lets one in-form player soak up the playing timewas what worked.

Eleven straight wins and still fourth: the arithmetic of the standings

Put the standings The Dink compiled before the final week next to what Pickleball.com wrote, and the reason wins and ranking do not line up becomes visible.

Each team plays five events in the regular season. Dallas has finished all five and is capped at 72 points, but LA and Brooklyn still have the final stop in Orlando ahead of them. A title there is worth 25 points, so LA passes Dallas with two points and Brooklyn goes ahead with seven. That is why Pickleball.com wrote that Dallas is projected to end the regular season sixth.

Look at the per-event figures and Dallas’ 14.4 is the lowest in the table. Two 25-point hauls in the second half of the season, the 11-match streak included, did not lift the average because the team kept dropping points across its first three events.The season-long standings barely register late-season momentum. The top 12 teams reach the playoffs, and the top four seeds skip the first round. Among the teams in the first round, the highest of them, the 5 seed, picks its opponent from 9th through 12th, with the 6, 7 and 8 seeds choosing in turn after that. Ties are broken by match win percentage, then game win percentage. Dallas will be waiting outside the seeding race while playing its best pickleball of the year.

How the people involved framed the result

Will Dorton, who wrote the Pickleball.com piece, led with the achievement of 11 straight wins and a second consecutive belt while noting in the body that the team is projected to slip to sixth. He kept the wins story and the standings story apart. In its final-week playoff guide, The Dink put the mark needed for the 12th spot at around 31 points and laid out the tiebreakers as well. The read is of a week in which the scramble at the bottom and the seeding fight at the top move at the same time.

What the players said sat somewhere other than the standings. Townsend credited the atmosphere in the building and said she is still improving. It is only natural that the feel of a player who entered three events and had a hand in all of them does not get folded back into a conversation about average points.

The pacing problem that bears on league design in Japan

When a corporate team league is put together in Japan, how to rank the teams tends to be left for later. What the MLP example shows is thatuntil every team has played the same number of events, a standings table does not mean anything as a ranking. Dallas’ fourth place is provisional, and it is published without adjusting for the difference in events remaining. A participating company that used the table in its PR would be issuing a correction the following week.

The fix is not hard. Either always print the number of events played alongside the points, or publish a table sorted by the per-event average at the same time. Either one is enough. The other route is to use the uncertainty of provisional standings as part of the show. A season in which nobody knows who takes a seed until the final stop is a draw in itself. Which route to pick depends on who the league is putting numbers out for.

One more thing a Japanese league will struggle to copy is the five-event structure. A rotation in which 20 franchises each play five events works because there are that many franchises. While the number of teams at home is still in single digits, a full round-robin is fairer and easier to explain. Importing the MLP format would mean growing the number of teams first.

What comes next, and how to follow it

Summary

Dallas’ 21-10 was a clear answer to the opponent it had let slip from 19-11 up in the same format. Even so, its place in the standings did not move, and what decides it is what other franchises do next week. As long as the league hands out value by event rather than by wins, that asymmetry cannot be avoided. Anyone running a league or a tournament series in Japan would do well to write the number of events played into the spec before publishing any standings table. For anyone watching, how many points LA and Brooklyn bank in Orlando, which opens July 30, will settle Dallas’ final seed on the spot. The playoff first round starts August 6 in Dallas.

Source:Pickleball.com／Pickleball.com (MLP Chicago)／The Dink Pickleball (playoff guide)／The Dink Pickleball (2026 rules)／The Kitchen Pickleball