Chicago’s Emmanuel Lebesson (SPINDEX: 2790) has been named Major League Table Tennis’ Player of the Week for Week 11, the league announced on Tuesday.
Carolina’s Chen Sun (2575), Chicago’s Robert Gardos (2841), Texas’s Joao Monteiro (2724) and Atlanta’s Yuya Oshima (2807) also received nominations for Week 11 Player of the Week.
Lebesson won eight of his nine Singles games during Week 11, with his only loss coming in his second game against Monteiro on Saturday (9-11). Lebesson also won two Doubles games on Sunday and contributed 11 Golden Game points during Chicago’s second undefeated weekend of Season 3.
Lebesson ends his regular season with a Singles percentage of 63% (34-20), a Doubles percentage of 44.4% (8-10) and a Golden Game percentage of 62% (67-41). His power rating of 765.9 makes him the league’s No. 5 player, and his 34 singles wins trail only Robert Gardos (39) for the most in all of MLTT.
“[My] first season, I was not myself,” Lebesson said. “In the second season, I feel much better, much [more] comfortable in the team.”
Lebesson becomes the first two-time Player of the Week winner since MLTT started recognizing only one player after every weekend. Only two other players, Bay Area’s Elsayed Lashin (2755) and New York’s Haeeun Choi (2562), have won Player of the Week multiple times in Season 3.
Lebesson earned his first Player of the Week award this season after Week 7 in Hollywood, Fla., when he became the third player in MLTT history to win all nine singles games in a single weekend. That week was the first time in MLTT history that the Player of the Week award went to a single player.
A Chicago Wind player has won Player of the Week for each of the three most recent weekends the team played in. Those three wins tie the New York Slice (9-6, 161 points) for the second-most Player of the Week awards among all MLTT teams.
Week 11 was the final weekend of the Wind’s regular season, which they ended with a 13-5 record and 227 points. They currently sit as the second seed in the West with more points, singles wins, Golden Game wins and match wins than any other team in their division.
“When you know you’re in the race for the playoffs, you start to feel a lot of pressure,” Lebesson said. “But it was good to play in this atmosphere again.”
MLTT will return for Week 12 from Feb. 13-15, when the Carolina Gold Rush (5-4, 88 points), Texas Smash (7-8, 161 points), Princeton Revolution (4-5, 97 points) and Bay Area Blasters (5-7, 117 points) face off in Pleasanton, Calif. These matches will be streamed exclusively on Table Tennis TV, which can be found on TableTennis.TV, iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV.
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