Before the 2025 MLP season began, I wrote an article about a new rule that I called the ‘Home Court Advantage Rule.’

I should note here that ‘home court’ in this context has nothing to do with geography or fan presence. Even though several teams did have hometown events this season, I mean ‘home team’ in terms of which team is designated on the MLP schedule as such in each matchup.

This home designation comes with several benefits, which are outlined in the 2025 MLP Rules Guide:

• “Teams designated as the “Home” team for a match will be responsible for submitting their player lineup for each match as well as each game lineup for women’s, men’s, mixed 1, mixed 2 and DreamBreaker by 10pm local time the night before scheduled matches. “Home” teams will be able to see the opponent’s lineups and respond to the gender, mixed, and DreamBreaker lineups.”

 

I wrote that, with this rule, the designated home team would have a “huge advantage” by getting to react to their opponents’ mixed doubles and DreamBreaker lineups.

I also noted that, with each team playing 25 regular season matches, it wouldn’t be mathematically possible to ensure that each squad would play an equal number of matches as the home team. I thought this seemingly minor scheduling discrepancy could spell the difference between one team making the playoffs and another team missing out.

 

 

 

 

 

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With 275 regular season matches in the books, I went through each one and compiled data to see if the ‘Home Court Advantage Rule’ had as big of an impact as I thought it would during the regular season.

So, does Home Court Advantage exist in Major League Pickleball? Let’s find out.

Data at a glance

The short answer to the above question is “No.” There was no positive correlation between being the home team and winning matches during the regular season.

The designated home teams had a 134-141 record across the 275 matches played at the Premier (95-105) and Challenger (39-36) levels, good for a 48.7% win rate.

Things aren’t quite this simple, though.

With increased roster sizes, 16 competing teams, and plenty of capable players stuck on Challenger rosters, there simply wasn’t enough talent available to make every Premier team competitively viable this year. Some rosters are just better than others, regardless of intangible team dynamics or advantages from being designated home or away.

In other words, the St. Louis Shock will beat the New York Hustlers regardless of whether St. Louis is home or away.

With that in mind, I then looked at matches between teams that finished inside the top 6 of the regular season standings (St. Louis Shock, Dallas Flash, New Jersey 5s, Brooklyn Pickleball Team, Columbus Sliders, Los Angeles Mad Drops) to see if adding more perceived parity into the sample would tell a different story.

It didn’t. The home team in those matchups had just a 9-15 record.

Quick note on DreamBreakers

The home team was also able to set the singles DreamBreaker matchups, so I looked at the 69 DreamBreakers played during the regular season to see if there was any relationship between home team designation and DreamBreaker success.

The home teams went 35-34 in those contests, so there was no strong correlation either way in that regard.

Did the extra home match make a difference?

With each team playing 25 regular season matches, there was no way to guarantee that each one would play the same number of home contests.

At the Premier level, eight teams played 13 home matches, and eight teams played 12 home matches:

• Teams that played 13: Atlanta Bouncers (13), Brooklyn Pickleball Team (4), Carolina Hogs (14), Chicago Slice (11), Columbus Sliders (5), Miami Pickleball Club (10), New Jersey 5s (3), Phoenix Flames (12)

 

• Teams that played 12: Dallas Flash (2), Los Angeles Mad Drops (6), New York Hustlers (16), Orlando Squeeze (8), SoCal Hard Eights (15), St. Louis Shock (1), Texas Ranchers (7), Utah Black Diamonds (9)

 

I thought that having one extra match as the home team would be a tangible advantage and potentially help some teams make the playoffs over others, but the distribution of playoff teams between the two groups is nearly even.

Four teams who played 13 home matches made it, while six teams who played 12 home matches advanced.

The Mid-Season Tournament: An outlier, or a sign of things to come?

I didn’t include the 40 Mid-Season Tournament matches in my data collection, but it’s worth noting that the home teams had a 32-8 record in Grand Rapids.

A key difference between that tournament and the ten regular season events is that the higher-seeded teams automatically received the home team designation, so those teams were already favored to win their matches in most cases, regardless of which team was home or away.

Still, though, this is a telling image of what we could see during the Toray MLP Playoffs, which begin on Friday in San Diego, CA.

 

The higher-seeded team in the play-in round will be the home team.

In the following rounds, which will be played as a two-out-of-three-match series, the higher-seeded team will be the home team for the first two matches of the series. If it goes to a third, a coin flip will be used to determine the home team for the decider.

Final Takeaways

Well, I was wrong.

I thought that the benefits of being the designated home team in a given matchup would lead to a lopsided record in favor of those teams.

As the regular season stats show, however, any sort of perceived advantage just never came to fruition.

The playoffs might end up telling a different story like we saw with the Mid-Season Tournament, but the big takeaway from this is something that continues to become clearer and clearer with each passing MLP season: perceived success doesn’t equal actual success.

Having a roster with the four best players in the world doesn’t guarantee wins. Victory in MLP comes down to what the numbers and rankings don’t show: the team chemistry, the emotional investment in and from the ownership group, the ability to use a crowd’s energy to bring out your best stuff in clutch moments.

The numbers tell part of the story, but the players themselves write the rest of it.

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Catch all of this week’s MLP playoff action from Barnes Tennis Center starting on Friday at 10am PT on Pickleballtv.