It is an honor to represent your city at Championship Weekend. Only the best teams in all of Major League Table Tennis (MLTT) can even sniff the postseason, let alone reach it. That’s a privilege granted solely to the league’s top four teams, the two top-ranked squads in each division. One of those teams is going to win the third-ever MLTT cup on April 19, and the Portland Paddlers, Princeton Revolution, Carolina Gold Rush and Chicago Wind have all earned the right to contend for it.
So what better way to recognize these juggernauts than by poking some holes in their exteriors?
We get it. No one likes a Negative Nancy, but that’s not who we’re trying to be. Instead, we aim to step into the shoes of Negative Nancy Drew, analyzing evidence and asking questions to determine which of these four suspects is most likely to steal the Season 3 championship.
That eventual thief could be any of these four teams, for several different reasons. They didn’t make it to the postseason for no reason, after all. And yet, there are just as many reasons these teams won’t become MLTT champions this year, given the several unique yet pressing challenges they have faced throughout the season. The MLTT Cup requires its recipient to address its obstacles, even if it means devoting hours, days and weeks to overcome them. Because if they don’t do so, their opponents will exploit any shortcomings those obstacles may expose.
We seek to fix that. To do so, we'll need each team to answer one question for us, but not in some dark, isolated interrogation room. They need to do so at Table Tennis Academy in Fremont, Calif., under the brightest lights and largest audience that MLTT has had all season long. Only then can they prove themselves worthy of hoisting the coveted MLTT Cup.
You don’t become the most successful regular-season team in MLTT history with a couple of good players. You do so with a roster complete with talented players from top to bottom. But what about a team that has five Player of the Week winners this season (Kang Dong-Soo, Kotomi Omoda, Sid Naresh, Jens Lundqvist and Hampus Nordberg), arguably the best Doubles tandem in the league (Naresh and Nikhil Kumar), and two rookies that can contribute at a moment’s notice (Min Hyeok Kim, Minhyung Jee)? You get the Portland Paddlers, who finished this season with a league-best record of 16-2 and 260 points.
It’s a good thing they have all that talent. Half of it won’t make the trip to Fremont, Calif. Kang is ineligible to compete, as he did not play in at least three MLTT weekends. Nordberg’s family is about to welcome their third child. Kim will also not compete in Championship Weekend, and a healthy, refreshed Omoda makes Jee’s presence on the roster redundant.
So … what’s left? They still have Kumar and Naresh, who are sure to lock down Doubles throughout the weekend. They still have Omoda, one of the most reliable women in the entire league. And they still have Lundqvist, who has ranked at or near the top of MLTT’s official power rankings list throughout most of Season 3. And to fill out the roster, they signed free agents Carlos Hernandez and Daryl Tsao, both of whom have played in MLTT this season.
If the Paddlers want to lift the MLTT Cup after Championship Weekend, they need those six players to step up. Lundqvist is almost certainly going to face either Benedek Olah or Cho Seungmin in the Paddlers’ semifinal round against the Princeton Revolution. Kumar or Naresh will likely take the other. Omoda will have to continue her dominance in Singles 2, as will Kumar and Naresh in Doubles. Hernandez and Tsao will have to prove that they can take a few points off of the Revolution’s top players.
This is the most vulnerable the Paddlers have been all season long, and they cannot hide behind their depth anymore. Kumar, Naresh, Omoda and Lundqvist have helped the Paddlers make MLTT history, but they’ll need to bring even more for two more matches if they want a storybook ending to their storybook season.
If MLTT matches ended after Doubles, the Princeton Revolution would have a record of 13-5. That’s an astounding record, one that would comfortably place them atop the East Division. Few teams have been better before the intermission all season long, with players such as Cho Seungmin and Benedek Olah manning Singles 1, Hsien Tzu Cheng and Jiangshan Guo alternating between Singles 2 and a variety of Doubles threats that include Cho, Olah, Koyo Kanamitsu and Jinxin Wang.
If MLTT matches ended after Singles 4, the Revolution would have finished this season with a 10-8 record. Not as much of a threat, but still a very good team deserving of a playoff spot. They tend to falter once Singles 3 starts, but they have the talent to bounce back from any missteps in Singles 4.
Unfortunately, MLTT matches do not end after Singles 4. They end after the Golden Games. And that might be the key reason Princeton ended Season 3 with a 7-11 record.
Of the 10 Golden Games they have entered with a lead, the Revolution have only won six of them. Three of those four losses came after losing an Ultimate Golden Point, and they lost their final one by a deficit of four Golden Game points. The Revolution are not much more impressive in their eight Golden Game wins, either. Only twice have they won a Golden Game by more than five points. They have an average point differential of +5.125 in those wins, which is around the equivalent of having every Golden Game victory come via a stressful score of 21-16.
Princeton has the talent to continue its dominant starts. Cho finished Season 3 as the league’s No. 1 player and Men’s MVP runner-up. Kanamitsu and Wang have been one of MLTT’s best Doubles tandems throughout the season. Olah is a strong anchor in Singles 4, and Cheng and Guo give the Revolution much-appreciated flexibility in Singles 2. They’ve made it to Championship Weekend by putting that roster together for hot starts, but they almost missed it because they struggle with finishing the job.
Any playoff opponent, especially the league-leading Portland Paddlers, will exploit the Revolution’s inability to close out matches if they don’t maintain their strong openings. Otherwise, those championship-winning dreams could end as soon as the semifinal round.
The Chicago Wind appear to have everything needed to earn a championship-winning trophy. A dominant tone-setter? There aren’t many better than Season 3 Men’s MVP Robert Gardos. A strong Singles 2 player? Mo Zhang still looks like the Women’s MVP she was in Season 2. An anchor in Singles 4? Look no further than Season 3 Men’s MVP bronze medalist Emmanuel Lebesson, a two-time Player of the Week winner this year.
Those three players have helped Chicago tie Portland as the best-performing Singles team in the league (131-85), and they helped their team become the first to clinch a playoff berth this season. With the talent, experience and success the Wind have, there isn’t a single reason why they can’t contend for the MLTT Cup at the end of this season.
We could think of some Doubles reasons, though.
The Wind finished Season 3 with a Doubles percentage of 44%, with 24 wins and 30 losses. That not only makes them the West Division’s worst-performing Doubles team, but that percentage ties with the Florida Crocs and New York Slice for the lowest Doubles tandem in the league. The blame for that ranking can’t fall on a single duo, either. The Wind have tried all sorts of Doubles combinations throughout the season, which usually involve any two of Gardos, Lebesson, Alexandru Cazacu, Jeongwoo Park, Daniel Tran and Isaac Vila. None of those players emerged as true mainstays in Doubles, and none of them received enough time with one another to develop on-court chemistry.
It would be one thing if this were still the regular season, but the Wind are far behind their Championship Weekend opponents in Doubles. The three other Championship Weekend teams happen to be three of the four best Doubles teams in the league. Each of those teams has players that not only understand their role in Doubles, but excel in it. The Paddlers, who have MLTT’s best Doubles percentage at 61.1% (33-21), will bring their star duo of Nikhil Kumar and Sid Naresh to Fremont. The Revolution, who top the East Division in Doubles with a percentage of 59.3% (32-22), can play with any two of Cho Seungmin, Koyo Kanamitsu or Jinxin Wang. And the Carolina Gold Rush, the Wind’s semifinal opponent, won the Season 2 title with the very same tandem of Enzo Angles and Kai Zhang they’ll likely be competing with in this postseason.
If the Wind’s opponents want to defeat them this weekend, they’ll probably be looking to do so through Doubles. That’s their only area of weakness relative to the rest of the league, but it only takes one weakness to destroy a team’s chances of winning a championship.
Three wins. Forty-three points. That’s how the Carolina Gold Rush opened their Season 3 in Week 2. They became the first team to win three matches and the first to secure an undefeated weekend. They did all of that while reminding the home crowd which team won the Season 2 championship.
That exact Gold Rush team finished Week 3 with one win and two losses. They could only score 18 points that entire weekend. The same players who dominated their East Division foes in Week 2 looked helpless against three West Division teams just one match weekend later. This wasn’t the same team that hoisted the MLTT Cup in Season 2. Except, aside from a few notable changes during that offseason, it was.
The consistency issues didn’t end after their mid-season hiatus. If anything, they looked to be trending in the wrong direction at first, with 1-2 finishes in both Weeks 11 and 12. That is, until a perfect Week 13 and a 2-1 Week 14 tipped the Gold Rush’s winning scale back to equilibrium.
The Gold Rush have enough talent to earn just two more wins this weekend. They have two MVP winners in Enzo Angles (Men’s MVP in Season 1) and Chen Sun (Women’s MVP in Season 3). Eugene Wang has been a bright spot for the Gold Rush all season long. Edward Ly and Wei Wang provide much-needed depth in Singles, and Kai Zhang holds down Doubles alongside Angles. They certainly can compete for a title, but will they? That depends on what version of the Gold Rush we see.
They have a chance to become the first multi-time champions in MLTT history, as long as they perform how they did in Weeks 2, 13 and 14. If they bring their Weeks 3, 11 and 12 performances, though, they’ll almost certainly be handing their trophy to another team.
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