Short answer: Here is how the MLP draft works — teams do not bid on players, they bid on draft slots. The team that bids the most money wins the right to pick first, and can then take any available player it wants. The team that wins slot two picks next, and so on. In 2026 the minimum bid for one of a team’s first four roster spots was $10,000, the top winning bid was $1.23 million, and the whole thing ran in two parts on Friday, February 27.
The 30-second version
- You bid for the pick, not the person. Highest bidder gets slot No. 1 and can choose anybody.
- Two parts. Part one fills roster spots 1–4 (minimum bid $10,000). Part two fills spots 5 and 6 (minimum bid $1,000).
- Nobody hoards. Every team must have four players before any team can bid on a fifth.
- Rosters are six deep in 2026 across 20 teams, with the old Premier/Challenger split gone.
- Keepers first. Teams could retain up to five players by the February 15 keeper deadline; everyone else went into the pool.
- 2026’s top bid: $1.23 million for the No. 1 slot, which St. Louis used on Anna Bright.
- And it nearly worked. The two biggest spenders in the room met in the Finals — and the cheaper roster won.
- New England angle: there is no MLP franchise up here, but the draft logic is the same logic you use picking a partner for a Saturday round robin.
Every year around the end of February, a bunch of pro pickleball team owners get on a call and spend seven figures in an afternoon, and every year I get the same question from people at the courts in Leominster: wait, they buy the players? Not quite. The mechanism is stranger and more interesting than that, and once it clicks, the whole league makes more sense.
How the MLP draft works, step by step
Major League Pickleball is the team league that sits alongside the PPA Tour under the same parent company. If that relationship is new to you, start with our explainer on the PPA Tour vs MLP and our overview of what Major League Pickleball actually is. What follows is the roster-building machinery underneath it.
The core idea is an auction for draft position. Teams do not raise a paddle and say “we want Anna Bright.” They bid dollars for the right to pick first. Whoever wins that auction then announces whichever player they like. Then the room bids again for the second pick, and so on down the line.
That one design choice changes everything. In a normal sports draft, a bad season buys you a high pick. In MLP, money buys you the pick — which means a team that badly wants one specific player has to guess how badly everyone else wants that player, and pay accordingly.
The rules that shape the bidding
MLP published its own framework in its summary of 2026 competition updates. The load-bearing pieces:
- Two separate parts. The draft runs in halves. The first half fills the roster spots that every team is required to fill; the second half fills the optional depth spots.
- Different minimums. A draft slot being used on one of a team’s first four roster spots carried a minimum bid of $10,000. A slot used on a fifth or sixth roster spot dropped to a $1,000 minimum.
- A four-player floor for everybody. In MLP’s words, all teams must have four players before any team bids on a fifth. A team sitting on five cannot chase a sixth until every other team has four.
- A gender-balance escape hatch. If a team had three players of one gender and fewer than two of the other, it was allowed to grab its second starter of the needed gender during the first part.
- Contract gate. Only UPA-signed players are eligible to play MLP at all, so the draft pool is bounded before it starts.
There is also a back door mid-season: a single waiver period on July 1, where each team may swap out up to one player, and only for a UPA-signed player who is not already on an MLP roster.
What happens before the draft?
The draft is really the second act. The first act is the keeper deadline, which in 2026 fell on February 15 at 4 p.m. ET. Each team could keep a maximum of five players from the prior season. Anything above that counted as a drop, and the dropped players landed in the pool with everyone else.
This is where the interesting pain lives. A team that had four genuinely good players and a rising fifth had to decide whether to protect the known quantity or let them go and trust the auction. Because rosters expanded to six in 2026 — up from four for the old Challenger-level teams — every team walked in needing at least one new body, and most needed two.
What did the 2026 MLP draft actually cost?
This is the part people want. According to The Kitchen’s live coverage of the February 27 draft:
- Anna Bright — $1.23 million, the No. 1 overall slot, won by the St. Louis Shock after a bidding war with New Jersey and Columbus.
- Jorja Johnson — $800,000, to the New Jersey 5s.
- Danni-Elle Townsend — $180,000, to the Columbus Sliders.
- Dylan Frazier — $170,000, to the Brooklyn Pickleball Team.
Note the shape of that list: a cliff. The gap between the first bid and the fourth is roughly seven times over. The first part of the draft accounted for 28 picks (16 female, 12 male) filling required spots; the second part ran another 38 picks (18 female, 20 male) for the fifth and sixth slots. Sixty-six picks in total, and the money was concentrated almost entirely at the very top.
Did the money actually buy a championship?
Here is the part I find genuinely fun, and it is the kind of thing you can only see in hindsight.
The two loudest bids in the room were St. Louis spending $1.23 million on the No. 1 slot and New Jersey spending $800,000 on the second. Those two franchises then met each other in the 2026 MLP Finals at Central Park in New York — and New Jersey swept it 2–0, winning both matches in a Dreambreaker. We covered the whole weekend in our 2026 MLP Finals recap.
So the honest read is: the aggressive spending put both teams in the final match of the season, which is exactly what it was supposed to do. It just could not decide which of them won. That is a reasonable argument that MLP’s auction is working the way an auction should — price roughly tracks value, and then the actual pickleball decides.
One caution before anyone builds a theory on four numbers: these are the reported top bids from a live blog, and MLP does not publish a full public ledger of every winning bid. Treat the four figures above as the well-documented headline prices, not as a complete salary table.
Why does the roster size matter so much?
Six-player rosters changed how teams drafted, not just how many players they drafted. Because every rostered player is available to play, teams could justify spending a cheap fifth or sixth slot on a specialist — a singles player, or someone you want specifically in the Dreambreaker.
That tiebreaker deserves its own note. When a match is tied after the three doubles games, it goes to a Dreambreaker, and teams may choose any four players from the roster — two men and two women — regardless of who played the doubles. That is a genuine roster-construction lever, and we dug into the player archetype it creates in our piece on the MLP Dreambreaker specialist.
The scoring reinforces it. A team gets 3 points for a regulation win, 2 for a Dreambreaker win, 1 for a Dreambreaker loss, and 0 for a regulation loss. Losing narrowly still pays. So a sixth player who is merely excellent under Dreambreaker pressure has real, countable value.
Is there a New England team in MLP?
No — and I get asked this constantly. Across the 20 franchises in the 2026 season there is no Boston, Hartford or Providence entry. The geographically closest teams to us are the Brooklyn Pickleball Team and the New Jersey 5s, which is a long way from a home game.
What that means practically is that if you want to see MLP-caliber play in person, you are watching a broadcast or planning a trip. The upside for New England players is different: the tournament pathway is open to amateurs in a way the team league is not. Our tournament hub is the better place to start if you want to actually compete.
What can a club player steal from draft logic?
This sounds like a stretch and it is not. The MLP auction is a formalized version of the calculation you run every time you pick a partner:
- Roster fit beats raw rating. Teams did not just buy the best available player; they bought the one who completed a lineup. Two bangers is not a team. Read our doubles strategy guide if that is landing.
- Depth has a price and it is low. The fifth and sixth slots went for a $1,000 minimum. Your equivalent is the reliable, unspectacular partner who never pops the ball up.
- Specialists win tiebreakers. The Dreambreaker rewards someone who is calm in singles. At your level that is the person who can still reset a hard ball at 10–10.
- Flexibility is an asset. Teams valued players who could slot anywhere. Being able to play either side — and to stack when it helps — makes you a more valuable partner than one more mph on your drive.
Frequently asked questions
When is the MLP draft?
The 2026 MLP draft was held on Friday, February 27, 2026, following a keeper deadline of February 15 at 4 p.m. ET. MLP has generally held the draft in late winter ahead of a season that runs from spring into late summer, but the league sets and announces the date each year, so check majorleaguepickleball.co rather than assuming.
Do MLP teams bid on players or on picks?
On picks. Teams bid money for a draft slot, and whoever wins that slot may then select any available player. It is an auction for order of choice, not for a specific athlete, which is what makes the bidding a guessing game about everyone else’s intentions.
What was the highest bid in the 2026 MLP draft?
The Kitchen’s live coverage reported $1.23 million as the winning bid for the No. 1 overall slot, which the St. Louis Shock used to select Anna Bright, after a bidding war with New Jersey and Columbus. MLP does not publish a complete public list of every winning bid.
How many players are on an MLP team?
Six in the 2026 season, across 20 teams, with the previous Premier and Challenger level designations removed. Every rostered player is eligible to play, and for the Dreambreaker tiebreaker a team may use any two men and two women from its roster.
Can a team change its roster after the draft?
Yes, but barely. MLP allowed one waiver period, on July 1, in which a team could swap out up to one of its players, and only for a player who is UPA-signed and not already on an MLP roster. Otherwise the roster you draft in February is the roster you run.
Written by Jason Regan, founder of Regan Family Pickleball in Leominster, Massachusetts. Facts in this piece come from Major League Pickleball’s own 2026 competition updates and The Kitchen’s live draft coverage, both linked above. More pro-tour explainers live in the Pro Corner — including what pro pickleball players actually earn.