Most teams shouldn’t have envied the Bay Area Blasters heading into Week 2. The team that finished with the worst record in the West Division last year opened their Season 4 with a battle against the reigning bronze medalists. Less than 24 hours later, they’d have to face the defending champions. And to cap off their weekend, they’d go against a team that was merely a Golden Game away from a Championship Weekend appearance in April.

They won all three matches by a score of 16-5.

The Chicago Wind, playing in front of their home crowd, had no answer for the Blasters on Friday. The Portland Paddlers couldn’t stop them on Saturday, either. The New York Slice got close on Sunday, but the Blasters won the Ultimate Golden Point against them to become the first team in Season 4 to finish a weekend undefeated.

This appears to be a massive upset when considering how the Blasters’ Season 3 went. But when you take a look at the sheer amount of talent on this team’s roster, this result becomes much less of a surprise. Lily Zhang (SPINDEX: 2659) wasn’t a finalist for the Women’s MVP for no reason last season, and her seven Singles wins suggest that she’s gunning for the award this year. Taehyun Kim (2750) looks like the player who won the Men’s MVP in Season 2, with his five Singles wins and six Doubles wins. Jinbao Ma (2786) has made many a difference for the Blasters throughout his Major League Table Tennis career, a fact he proved with his six Singles wins this weekend. All three players earned 12 points in the Golden Game, which ties them for the second-most among all players this weekend.

Blasters coach Tim Wang should be incredibly proud of his Blasters squad, who left Week 2 unscathed without Antoine Hachard (2800), the fourth overall pick in the Season 4 MLTT Draft. They won’t even have a chance to drop their first match until Dec. 4, when they face the Princeton Revolution to begin their Week 7 in front of their home crowd. Until then, the Blasters can rest easy knowing they have sole possession of the West Division’s top seed. A championship could be theirs in just a few months, and they’ve certainly proven how formidable they can be in these three matches.

Most Valuable Performance

It’s hard to truly fault the Chicago Wind for their 1-2 outing in Week 1. After all, they were without Robert Gardos (2856) for their first match of the season, which they lost 7-14 to the new-look Atlanta Blazers. If only they could squeeze three matches out of the Season 3 Men’s MVP winner. What would that weekend have looked like?

If it looked anything like Week 2, we would be talking about a completely different outcome.

Robert Gardos’s weekend started with two games over Bay Area’s Taehyun Kim on Friday. He then swept New York’s Tao Wenzhang (2679) on Saturday before taking two Doubles wins from Kaden Xu (2705) and Koki Niwa (2816). All that was left was Jens Lundqvist (2795), a core member of the reigning champion Portland Paddlers. That accolade meant nothing to Gardos, who sent Lundqvist away for three straight wins, his sixth, seventh and eighth Singles victories of the weekend.

Gardos led the Wind to two of three victories in Week 2, a complete reversal from their pedestrian Week 1. A 5-16 loss to the Bay Area Blasters on Friday certainly stung, but they flipped that score against the New York Slice the following day. Their victory over the Paddlers on Sunday didn’t come without a challenge, but they earned a 21-19 win during the Golden Game to take that match 13-8.

Speaking of the Golden Game, the Wind dominated the end of each match. Sean Zhang (2660) led the way with 12 Golden Game points against Lundqvist, Lily Zhang and Yiran Wu (2644). Emmanuel Lebesson (2795) and Mo Zhang (2557) each earned 11 points, and Gardos contributed 10. Jeongwoo Park (2746) scored eight in his Season 4 debut, and those points came against Kim, Niwa and Nikhil Kumar (2793).

The Wind should be thankful for that Golden Game excellence, because what happened before left much to be desired. Only Gardos and Mo Zhang won more than five Singles games this weekend, and they couldn’t complete a sweep in Doubles with three different duos. It’s easy to wonder if Daniel Tran (2577) would have changed some of those results, but he was diagnosed with the flu before he could play in his first match of the weekend. If Tran returns before the Wind face the Texas Smash on Oct. 30, and if Gardos continues to play like the MVP he was last season, the third-seeded Wind could jump right back into postseason position before long.

Are the Champions in Trouble?

The Portland Paddlers gave it their all during Championship Weekend last year. But just from judging their Week 2 performance, they might have given a little too much. 

The Paddlers looked like the defending champions in their Season 4 debut on Friday, which they finished with a 15-6 victory over the New York Slice. They wish they could say the same on Saturday, but that’s when the Paddlers suffered their first loss in 11 months at the hands of the Bay Area Blasters by a score of 5-16. They could redeem themselves by overcoming a 19-20 Golden Game deficit against the Chicago Wind on Sunday, but the Wind wouldn’t let that happen. Jeongwoo Park took the final Golden Game point over Nikhil Kumar to hand the Paddlers an 8-13 loss.

The Paddlers now have as many losses in one week (two) as they did during the entirety of Season 3. That doesn’t mean several members of the Paddlers didn’t impress, though. Hampus Nordberg (2774) led all players with 14 Golden Game points this weekend, and he earned those points against Yiran Wu (2644), Chihwei Yeh (2673) and Robert Gardos. Min Hyeok Kim (2761) scored nine Golden Game points of his own, which added to his six Singles games against Koki Niwa, Taehyun Kim and Jeongwoo Park. Eleventh-overall pick Yerin Kim (2507) made her MLTT debut this weekend, and she even won three games against a gauntlet consisting of Mendy Wang (2375), Lily Zhang and Mo Zhang.

Whether it’s a genuine regression or just a post-championship slump, the Paddlers started Season 4 off slower than they hoped. But they’re not out of it yet. They’ve only had one week to defend their title, and that week came without Women’s MVP finalist Kotomi Omoda (2574) or first-round rookie Minseo Oh (2725). This is still the same Paddlers team that won the Season 3 MLTT Championship after playing the most dominant regular season in league history. Things may look bleak for the West Division’s fourth seed at the moment, but if any team can return to form and contend for an MLTT title, it’s the Paddlers without question.

Where Nightmares are Made Of

If the Princeton Revolution lost the final Golden Game of the regular season last year, the New York Slice would have competed for the Season 3 MLTT Championship. The Slice would have earned the chance to take down the depleted Portland Paddlers, who hoisted the trophy at the end of Championship Weekend. They were so close to making their first postseason appearance in team history, and they hope to change that in Season 4. 

They didn’t even change the number in their win column during Week 2.

Defeating two postseason teams and a talented Bay Area Blasters squad is no easy task for a team that hadn’t played together in over five months. Just ask the Slice. A 9-21 Golden Game loss capped off a 6-15 defeat at the hands of the Portland Paddlers on Friday. They couldn’t win a single three-game set during their 5-16 loss to the Chicago Wind on Saturday. And remember the Blasters’ Ultimate Golden Point that made them the first team to finish a weekend undefeated this season? That point came at the expense of the Slice, whose 5-16 loss on Sunday earned them the first winless weekend of Season 4.

The Slice’s fortunes depended heavily on superstar Koki Niwa last season. When Niwa played well, the Slice would often win. When he struggled, so did the Slice. That wasn’t the case during the Slice’s opening weekend, which Niwa finished with five Singles wins, five Doubles wins and 11 Golden Game points. He was the Slice’s best player during Week 2, but he wasn’t enough to secure his team a win.

With that said, the Slice had plenty of positive takeaways this year. Kaden Xu earned 10 Golden Game points against Jens Lundqvist, Emmanuel Lebesson and Chihwei Yeh. Tao Wenzhang scored eight against Nikhil Kumar, Robert Gardos and Elsayed Lashin (2734). The dynamic duo of Niwa and Xu had five Doubles wins together, trailing only Taehyun Kim and Baek Kwang-il (2608) for the most Doubles wins from a duo all weekend long.

Those individual performances weren’t enough to earn the Slice a single win. They remain the league’s only team without one, and their 16 combined points currently stand as the lowest in all of MLTT. The Slice will have an opportunity to change that as early as Oct. 9 against the Atlanta Blazers, and they hope they do. That win will be necessary if they hope to reach the postseason, or at the very least, avoid an uphill battle to make it there.

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