Major League Pickleball 2024 Trade Deadline And Latest Waivers Recap

This week, the Major League Pickleball (MLP) trade deadline for the 2024 season came and went, and a slew of ladies got shuffled around various teams .

Then, the third waiver wire period for the 2024 took place, with the Premier and then Challenger teams able to perform drops and adds of players ahead of the next two MLP events.

This post recaps all the moves made this week, and discusses the potential impact for all parties involved.

First up, let's look at the Trades . The first three trades all involve the same team and some of the same players getting moved around, so we'll talk about them together.

1. Utah sends Callie Smith to Columbus for Andrea Koop and cash.
2. Utah then sends Koop to Brooklyn for Lina Padegimaite and cash.
3. Utah then sends Padegimaite to California for Genie Erokhina and cash.

These involved teams are now:

Analysis: Utah is eliminated from playoff consideration, was the sole team in the premier league not to spend more than its $500,000 allotment of dollars to construct the team, and has now acquired cash in five separate trades this year. According to my back of the envelope calculations, he's now netted $175k of actual money through the five separate trades he's completed this year. Does Connor Pardoe have a bunch of unpaid parking tickets or something? Or is he just working the system to its design?

California is also now eliminated from playoff consideration and has no reason other than pride to play out the string. Columbus is essentially eliminated too (they have 15 points from 18 matches played, and the 6th place team has 30 points as we stand). So it certainly is interesting to see these teams make a slew of trades amongst themselves, especially trades involving cash payments.

One of the issues that MLP faces from an integrity standpoint is the lack of a threat of relegation for its ten premier league teams, and the situation that eliminated teams find themselves in at the end of the season. There's almost no incentive to keep any player on your roster at this point that doesn't factor into your long term plans. And, these eliminated teams can end up impacting the rest of the league by fielding weakened rosters in the last events. I wonder if this is something the league takes into consideration going forward. Honestly, I'm surprised we didn't see MORE trades out of the now-eliminated teams.

Utah's roster is inarguably weakened by replacing Callie Smith with Genie Erohkina (one of the worst performers last weekend in Virginia Beach), but the roster rules incentivize teams to dump a mid-season acquisition like Smith, so why not cash in at the trade deadline? Columbus improves their roster (Smith and Koop are both near the bottom of the MLP player standings this year, but Smith is ranked 5th in Women's doubles on the PPA versus Koop's 20th), but to what end? They're not going to make the playoffs, so why bother moving personnel?

Brooklyn turned its 1st round pick Padegimaite into former premier league player Koop; is that an improvement for them? Will the slight of being dumped to challenger impact Koop's game? Lastly, eliminated California ends up with Padegimaite, who has to be relatively miffed that she's gone from a lead position with a playoff team to a playing-out-the-string team like California.

Let's look at the other two trades before talking waiver wire moves.

The involved teams are now:

This was a shocker, based on the perceived close relationship between Carolina's star Ben Johns and Irvine, one of his favored pre-ALW mixed partners on tour. It's also a bit of a surprise given that Irvine's results this year in MLP are superior to Christian's. The thought process here for Carolina has to be incremental improvement of the DreamBreaker capabilities of Christian, a dominant singles player, versus Irvine, whose singles game has waned over the years. Ben Johns may also be thinking that he can improve his Mixed doubles results (at MLP Salt Lake for example, Ben and Jesse were just 3-3 together). Meanwhile, AZ probably is just looking for a better Mixed partner for Dylan Frazier, after he struggled the last couple of events with Christian (together they went just 4-8 in Mixed with some relatively poor losses in their last two MLP events together). AZ is not playoff eliminated, but they certainly have their work cut out for them, and I'm not sure this move makes them better.

The final trade deadline move:

The team rosters are now:

Columbus manages to change out both its females inside of a few minutes at the trade deadline. And no team is further from its draft-day formulation at this point, with only Riley Newman being retained from what the team looked like in May. But is Columbus improved here? After struggling in Mixed (going winless in Kansas City), Dizon and Devilliers went 5-1 together at MLP Salt Lake, with their only loss against ALW. Why change that up? Perhaps the answer is a simple as, Columbus has nothing to play for ... except that they ended up sending cash in both this deal and the above deal with Utah. Why spend cash if you're already eliminated?

Meanwhile, I think Orlando has to like this new config, pairing the solid left-sided Dizon with the known right-sided David. David & Todd struggled together (they went just 2-4 in MLP KC), likely since they both may be more suited for right-sided duty, but now there's no question; both of their ladies are going to be in comfortable positions.

Lets move onto the waiver wire moves. The previous waiver-wire period for MLP was in early August, and not one premier league team made a move . That wasn't the case this time around. Here's a look at the Premier moves:

Utah is now: Garnett, Loong, Truong, Bouchard

Analysis: Utah played kingmaker all week, knowing it planned on using its first waiver wire priority pick to take a female and picking up a ton of cash along the way. They drop newly acquired Erokhina in favor of another Genie, this being Genie Bouchard. I got to see Erokhina first-hand last week in Virginia Beach; she finished 38th of 40 challenger players and struggled with consistency all weekend.

Columbus is now: Newman, Bellamy, Dizon, Smith

Analysis: Devilliers announced last week he needed knee surgery and would miss a couple of months, so one way or another, Columbus needed a player. Bellamy was onsite in Virginia Beach as a designated alternate and got plenty of practice time in while waiting to see if his services would be needed, and is probably the best un-signed player out there right now who isn't totally a singles specialist. At the end of the day, as discussed above, Columbus is basically eliminated so it doesn't entirely matter who they pick to play out the string.

Frisco is now: Auvergne, Loyd, Radzikowska, Emmrich

Analysis: no real surprise here: Cincola missed MLP Virginia Beach after struggling badly at MLP NYC (he went 0-10), and was replaced by Loyd. Loyd was incrementally better for Frisco, and joins them for the rest of the season.

That's it for trades for the 2024 season. There is one more waiver period the last weekend of October after the last two MLP events (Las Vegas and Miami), but before the playoffs start. If there's any final action we'll post another recap. Until then, MLP returns to action just after next weekend's PPA Las Vegas event with a Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday event tacked on the end of the regular tour stop.