Major League Pickleball (MLP), presented by DoorDash, visited the Windy City this past weekend for the 8th of its nine week whirlwind regular 2026 season. It comes on the back of a crazy trade deadline day that saw two of the league favorites make massive moves to try to win this season, and as the teams start to finish up their 2026 season.

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 Chicago Week 8 Event home page
  • League Standings__and- __Team/Player Stats
  • MLP 2026 Schedule__along with- __Rosters for the 20 Premier League Teams

Transaction Recap & Player News

We covered the final trade deadline and final waiver period moves, with in-depth analysis of their impacts, in a separate post late last week.

  • Click here for the Trade Deadline/Waiver No. 5 move breakdown
  • Click here for the MLP official Trade Deadline transaction list
  • Click here for the MLP official Waiver period moves.

Premier League Group Stage Match Recap

Day 1 Observations

  • Dallas opened up the weekend still riding high from their win in San Diego. They dominated in gender doubles to take a 2-0 lead over Las Vegas, then squeaked out both Mixed matches 11-9 for the 4-0 sweep.
  • Chicago’s young lineup surprised the veteran Atlanta team out of the gate, sweeping gender doubles. Atlanta ground back both Mixed matches, but the youthful Slice dominated the DreamBreaker 21-13 to put a damper on Atlanta’s recent run. This would end up being the group tiebreaker sending Chicago to the 3rd place game, amazingly.

Day 2 Observations

  • With Riley and Rachel both doing just part-time duty, the Brooklyn subs were put into action. California’s new look team pushed Brooklyn the whole match, losing 3-1 but with a coupe of extra-time games along the way. We would not have known it at the time, but this ended up being the deciding match for 1st place in the group.
  • Chicago sat its leader Navratil in favor of bench player and super-sub Koller, and he led his young teammates to a surprise win over Las Vegas to put a real hurt on LV's playoff chances.
  • Texas was missing their talisman Eric Oncins, and his replacement Rafa Hewett did just enough to get his team to the DreamBreaker. There though, Miami was just too tough and Texas couldn’t recover after going down early, and Miami puts the shock win on the group contenders. This would end up being the tie-breaker in the group that sends Miami to the 3rd place game, a huge shot in their late playoff push.

Day 3 Observations

  • Oncins was back, but it didn’t matter as California shocked the group favorites Texas and put themselves into firm Playoff contention with a DB win.
  • Utah showed a little life against Chicago, getting a win but not enough to stay out of the group cellar and avoid playoff elimination.
  • Brooklyn sat its players for much of its final group match against Texas, the most anticipated match of the group, having already secured 1st place in the group, and Texas salvaged a win in a disappointing match for the neutrals.
  • California sewed up 2nd place, amazingly, in the group with a win over the plucky Miami team.

Group Stage Results

At the end of the group stages, here were the standings, which drive the final day’s competition.

  • Group A:Brooklyn, California, Miami, Texas, Phoenix
  • Group B: Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Las Vegas, SoCal, Utah.

Lots of surprises in these group standings: Chicago finishes 2nd despite trading away its assets earlier this season. California finishes 2nd despite being one of the lowest payroll teams this season.

Event Standings Results

For 2026, the final day features the Event Standings matches, where the winner of Group A players the Winner of Group B, the 2nd place teams play for 3rd, the 3rd place teams play for 5th, and so on. Here’s a review of those final matches.

  • Event 1st Place match: Dallas won its 2nd event on the trot with a dominant DreamBreaker performance over Brooklyn to win 21-10.
  • Event 3rd Place match: In perhaps the most shocking playoff matchup of the season, California swept out Chicago for 3rd place and a massive boost to its playoff hopes.
  • Event 5th Place match: Miami finished off an amazing weekend for them with a solid win over a playoff team in Atlanta.
  • Event 7th Place match: A disappointed Texas blew through Las Vegas in the 7th place match, opportunities missed this weekend for sure.
  • 9th & 10th place goes to Phoenix and SoCal, who earn 1 point a piece. 11th place goes to Utah, who finished last in the group with 6 teams. They receive 0 event standing points.

2026 League Team Standings Update Post Event

Here are the teams who made notable moves up or down the season Standings in this event. Because of imbalanced schedules, we will use Points per Match to determine the “standings” in this analysis.

  • Dallas jumps up from 8th to 6th in the standings, and may even get ahead of Brooklyn if they struggle too badly in the Orlando event.
  • California with the huge jump up, from 16th before the Chicago event to now sit in 9th place, well within playoff position.
  • Despite losing in the 5th place match, Atlanta bolsters its playoff creds by jumping over several teams to move up from 14th place.
  • Las Vegas plummets down the board with its 8th place finish, and now sits outside the playoff positions.
  • Utah was the big loser this week, going from 12th to 17th and being officially eliminated from playoff contention.

Player Stats Analysis for the Weekend

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

  • Brooke Buckner for Dallas was the leading regular for the weekend, going 5-1 and winning 65% of her points.
  • Texas’ Nico Acevedo was dominant: he went 8-1 this weekend. His male partner Oncins went 7-1, which helps direct the trouble areas for Texas as they finish 4th in the group.
  • SoCal’s Will MacKinnon went just 1-9 this weekend.

What did we learn this weekend?

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

  • California and Miami are dangerous. California’s wheeling and dealing now has them with a very solid team that could really cause some matchup issues in the playoffs.
  • Miami has spent its entire season trading away its best players, yet still finds ways to win.
  • How is it possible that Dallas finished in dead last place in Austin but now has two event wins? Had they played to their potential that week, they may be in 3rd place instead of 6th.

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 Dink’s Thomas Shields wins another week, nearly running the slate, and is now tied for the season lead with his colleague Nico the Lefty. Yours truly went a respectable 9 out of 11 this week to keep pace, but I’m well off the season lead at this point.

Next up on the Pickleball Calendar? According to my Master Pickleball Schedule, We head right to Orlando for the big finish of the MLP regular season, with all the big teams in action. Week 9 will feature the two teams that made the biggest trade deadline moves (New Jersey and Los Angeles), and will also feature St. Louis and Brooklyn, meaning four of the top 5 teams are in action.

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.