On 13 September, at the Leapmotor Kuala Lumpur Cup, Tama Shimabukuro beat Noe Khlif 11-8, 11-5 to win his second PPA Tour Asia singles title. The next day MLP Asia held its first International Draft. The Viet Panthers won the bidding for the first pick of round one and used it on him.
On 8 November, in Farmers Branch, Texas, he and JW Johnson came from two games down to win the men’s doubles at the Opendoor Pickleball World Championships. He is 15. And on Friday 13 November, when MLP Asia plays its first match in Tokyo, the Panthers will own a world champion without yet having played a point.
That is a good eight weeks for a scouting department. Whether it was a good draft is a different question, and a more interesting one.
How the auction worked
MLP Asia did not run a draft in the American sense. Each of the six teams first picked three domestic players, at least one man and one woman, and named a captain. The other three places on every roster went through a live auction on 14 September.
The league’s own account of the rules is worth reading slowly. Before each of the three rounds, teams bid for the order of selection, and the highest bidder chose first. Every team had a US$250,000 cap that had to cover both those bids and its players’ salaries. Salaries were fixed by the World Pickleball Rankings: US$25,000 for a player in the top 20, US$10,000 from 21 to 50, US$5,000 from 51 down. According to the league’s draft preview, every bid also went into the season’s prize pool.
So a team could pay twice for a star: once for the right to pick first, and again in salary. The league has not published the bids, so nobody outside the room knows what the Panthers paid to go first. We do know what they got.
Eighteen picks, two snapshots
Fifty-two players declared for the auction, and MLP Asia published each one’s world ranking as at draft day. Put those numbers beside the PPA Tour’s current World Pickleball Rankings and you get a fair test of who bought well. Every one of the 18 picks appears on the current list.
Shimabukuro went into the draft 11th among the men. He is now eighth, the only man taken in the auction who sits inside the men’s top 20. The two men picked straight after him, Eunggwon Kim of South Korea (second pick, Malayan Stripes) and India’s Armaan Bhatia (third, Hong Kong Cannons), have both drifted: Kim from 21st to 23rd, Bhatia from 15th to 22nd.
The women tell a different story, and the order makes less sense. Round one produced five men and one woman, Japan’s Seina Shima, who was ranked 100th and still is. The four highest-ranked women in the pool all went later. Chao Yi Wang went seventh, Kaitlyn Christian eighth and Jamie Wei tenth. Lacy Schneemann, 13th on draft day, was the 18th and final pick, to the Malayan Stripes. She is now 11th. Among the 18, only Christian, at tenth, sits higher on the women’s list.
On today’s numbers, then, the best value in the auction was the last name called. Not first among equals. Last.
Rankings are not the whole roster
Before anyone marks down the Manila Helios, the counter-argument. A ranking is a points table built from where people chose to play over the past year. It is not a scouting report, and it certainly is not a measure of what a player is worth to a team fighting for a home crowd.
Team Tokyo, now named THE DOTS TOKYO, show why. Their round-one pick was Nasa Hatakeyama, 98th on draft day and 83rd now, a 183cm left-hander who, according to the team’s own site, became the first Japanese man to finish runner-up in men’s singles at a PPA Tour Asia event this year, in Kuala Lumpur. Their 13th pick, Daniel Moore, had no ranking on the draft list and is 523rd today. The same site calls him the person to whom every Japanese player’s roots eventually lead, credits him with nine US national titles and names him the team’s player-coach. Ranking points are the wrong instrument for that job.
The salary scale points the same way. Shima and Hatakeyama each cost US$5,000 under the published scale; Christian and Schneemann each cost US$25,000. With bids and wages drawn from one cap, a cheap round-one pick is not necessarily a wasted one. Without the bids, nobody can prove it was a clever one either.
Some names did move. Hatakeyama climbed 15 places, Grayson Goldin went from 55th to 42nd, Kei Sawaki from 50th to 43rd and Mihae Kwon from 59th to 52nd. Muhammad Aiman, Manila’s second pick, slid from 187th to 257th. And Connor Garnett, 13th among the men on draft day and 14th now, went unpicked altogether. Pickleball.com noted the omission at the time. The reason has not been published.
What the Panthers actually built
The Panthers’ international picks were Shimabukuro, Christian and Ho Tam, a Vietnamese player taken 16th, who is 66th on the women’s list. On the current rankings that gives one team the highest-ranked man and the highest-ranked woman among the 18 picks.
Both are singles winners in Asia. Christian won the women’s singles in Kuala Lumpur on the same weekend Shimabukuro won the men’s, her third straight PPA Tour Asia singles title. That matters in a format where a tie at 2-2 goes to a DreamBreaker, a rotating singles tiebreak to 21.
The domestic core is not decoration either. According to the Panthers’ launch announcement, captain Quan Do and Hien Truong won men’s doubles gold together at the Beijing Open and the Ho Chi Minh City Open on PPA Tour Asia this year, and Sophia Nhi Huynh and Ho Tam won the women’s doubles at the Shenzhen Open last August. On the current list Truong is 30th among the men, Do 50th and Huynh 47th among the women.
Here is the caveat the Worlds title cannot fix. Shimabukuro won Worlds with JW Johnson. In MLP Asia his men’s doubles partner will come from Do and Truong, and no Worlds title travels with him to that pairing. That is the partnership to watch.
Eight weeks in the life of a first pick
The Panthers did not have to wait long for evidence. In Brisbane in October he and Johnson reached the final and lost to Gabriel Tardio and Hayden Patriquin. A week later in Hong Kong he lost the men’s singles final to Hunter Johnson 11-4, 6-11, 11-7, the result that made it the rivalry men’s singles needs. At the inaugural MLP Nations Cup in Dallas he played for an Asia International side drawn from all six MLP Asia teams, and he and Hong Kit Wong, the Hong Kong Cannons captain, beat Andrei Daescu and Arwid Dahlin 11-7.
Then Worlds. He and Johnson, the No. 4 seeds, lost the first two games of the final to Daescu and Christian Alshon 11-5, 11-5 and won the next three 11-4, 11-8, 11-4. Our Championship Sunday report has the detail. A year earlier, The Kitchen Pickleball pointed out, he had been at Worlds on the Major League Pickleball Junior All-Star team. “This is crazy,” he said. “I never thought I’d be here the next year winning this event.”
The Panthers can say the same about their purchase. When they bid, he was a two-time PPA Tour Asia singles champion. By the time they play, he is a world champion.
Where it starts
MLP Asia begins on Friday 13 November at the Sansan Pickleball Court in Ikebukuro, where THE DOTS TOKYO, jointly established by TBS Holdings and dentsu Sports & Entertainment, play the Manila Helios at 18:00 Japan time and the Malayan Stripes at 19:30. Both ticket categories on the TBS ticket page are marked sold out. The DOTS site says all matches will be streamed on TBS Sports’ official YouTube channel. According to MLP Asia, Japan’s player numbers are estimated at around 330,000 in 2026, roughly seven times the figure a year earlier, and the league’s introduction to the team makes the point that until now none of them had a professional team at home to follow.
The Panthers start the next day in Hong Kong, where the Cannons host them and then the Dragon Warriors at the Discovery Bay Recreation Club. Their own home day follows on 21 November at AP Sports Club in Vietnam. After three weeks of group play, four of the six go through to the semi-finals on 11 December and the final day on 12 December. We have already set out why the opening week matters alongside China’s own circuit.
The verdict
Did the Panthers win the auction? On the evidence so far, yes. They bought a player who was rising and he has kept rising, all the way to a world title, and they paired him with the best-ranked woman in the pool.
Was the auction itself a ranking exercise? Clearly not. The last pick is the second-best-ranked woman of the 18; a round-one pick is ranked 100th; the player-coach of the home team is 523rd. That is either a market that knows something the rankings do not, or a market that has not met itself yet.
The first evidence arrives on 13 November. The Panthers’ first pick is already a world champion. Now he needs a partner.
