The best selections in the Major League Table Tennis (MLTT) Draft aren’t always at the top.
The Carolina Gold Rush likely didn’t expect Chen Sun (2627) to win Season 3 Women’s MVP when they selected her with the No. 20 pick in that year’s draft. The Portland Paddlers must consider themselves lucky to have snagged future MLTT champion Jens Lundqvist (2786) with the No. 12 pick in the Season 2 MLTT Draft. The Bay Area Blasters couldn’t have imagined that they would select one of the league’s most impactful players with the No. 22 pick in the inaugural MLTT Draft, but that’s exactly what Lily Zhang (2606) became.
There’s always at least one player who outperforms their selection in the MLTT Draft, and the Season 4 MLTT Draft is bound to have at least one. It’s hard to imagine anyone performing at the same level as Quadri Aruna, Takuya Jin or Omar Assar, but the draftees who do wouldn’t be the first. Every year, players taken at the bottom of the draft prove they can sit at the same table as the ones whose names were called early. And while the following players may not have been taken with a top-three pick, they certainly have the potential to play like one in the seasons to come.
It doesn’t feel right to have the fifth overall pick on a list like this. After all, An Jaehyun was the fifth player selected out of nearly one hundred candidates. A selection that high should indicate that this player has massive expectations, and he does. The Spinners selected An while hoping he can lead them to the Season 4 postseason after becoming the first team to suffer elimination in Season 3.
There’s something else that doesn’t feel right, though: An, the current No. 22 player in the world, fell all the way to the fifth pick. An may have had the strongest argument for being the best prospect in the Season 4 MLTT Draft, given all of his accolades. He’s a two-time Asian Champion, a member of the No. 4 Men’s Doubles pair in the world and the only MLTT player to have competed at WTT Finals Hong Kong 2025.
The most tantalizing part about An’s prospect status? He’s only 26 years old and the only top-five pick in the Season 4 MLTT Draft under 30. Those accomplishments are just the beginning of what’s already been a phenomenal table tennis career, and the Spinners will get him in the prime of his career. He’s about to headline a roster that already includes Alexandre Robinot (2760), Ľubomír Pištej (2717), Matilda Ekholm (2584) and Aditya Sareen (2695), suddenly turning the Spinners into what could be a serious contender for the MLTT Cup.
Not bad for the fifth overall pick.
Romain Lorentz must own an incredible good luck charm. He started his draft by selecting An Jaehyun, who boasted the highest estimated SPINDEX rating (2900) of any prospect in the Season 4 MLTT Draft. One round later, he drafted Zhang Binyue, who had the highest estimated SPINDEX rating among all female prospects (2600).
That SPINDEX rating wasn’t handed to her. She earned that rating through her experience competing in the China Super League and her wins against Izabela Lupulesku and Sofia-Xuan Zhang show that she can compete with the best women in the world. That’s exactly what she’ll be doing in her first season with MLTT, where she will compete against Lily Zhang, Mo Zhang (2566), Kotomi Omoda (2574) and Amy Wang (2588) in search of a West Division playoff berth.
Fortunately for the rookie, she won’t be the Spinners’ main Singles 2 option. Matilda Ekholm was one of the league’s best women throughout Season 3, and she will continue to compete for the Spinners next season. Zhang’s presence on the roster will most likely be as a contingency plan for Ekholm, something the Spinners did not have last season. And it’s awfully nice for one of the league’s highest-rated women to be that contingency plan.
Whenever Koki Niwa played well last season, the New York Slice ended up winning.
The Slice’s superstar was a crucial part in each of his team’s Season 3 wins. In fact, the Slice lost only one match that Niwa won at least two Singles games in this past season. Plenty of the Slice’s matches ended with Niwa outperforming his Singles opponent, but not all of them. Only two matches in the latter category ended in Slice victories, both of which came within three points or less. If the result of one of those losses had been flipped, the Slice could have very easily earned their first-ever trip to Championship Weekend.
That did not happen, so the Slice made sure to find a running mate for Niwa in the Season 4 MLTT Draft. That’s not an easy task to accomplish with the No. 16 overall selection, but they couldn’t have chosen a much better player than Mohamed Elbeiali to fill their void. The former No. 44 player in the world and current No. 140 has plenty of experience competing at high levels, and he’s got a trophy case to match. Elbeiali is an Olympian, a two-time bronze medalist at the African Championships and a member of Egypt’s gold medal-winning African Games team. He’s also a threat in Doubles, and he made that clear when he and Youssef Abdelaziz became the first African pair to advance to the quarterfinals of an ITTF World Table Tennis Championships Finals event in 2025. And if the Slice were looking for a player at the level of Quadri Aruna, why not draft a player who has beaten Aruna as recently as 2023?
It’s hard to find players who can determine a team’s success quite like Niwa can. But if Elbeiali plays better than one would expect from a No. 16 pick, then the Slice’s success in Season 4 may not solely depend on their superstar.
What do Izabela Lupulesku, Bruna Takahashi, Andreea Dragoman, Christina Kallberg and Adriana Diaz have in common? Aside from being ranked among the Top 100 Women’s SIngles players in the world, all five women have lost to Anastasiia Kolish.
They’re far from the only ones. Kolish has also taken down No. 145 Adina Diaconu, and holds winning records against current Top 500 players Tijana Jokic, Anna Wegrzyn and Sabina Surjan. She was declared an “ace” for her country when she was just 12 years old. And at 25, Kolish will compete against even more players ranked within the top 100, including Bay Area’s Lily Zhang and Chicago’s Mo Zhang.
She’ll even be teaming up with one: Amy Wang. Like with Zhang Binyue on the Spinners, Kolish isn’t expected to usurp Wang’s position as the team’s primary Singles 2 option. Wang has been the face of the Smash since her very first season in the league, and she’ll be their main competitor going forward. But the Smash had no other women on their roster last season, which forced them to rely on free agents whenever Wang couldn’t compete. Drafting Kolish provides the Smash with a fallback option should Wang be unavailable for a weekend. If that scenario were to play out next season, Smash head coach Paul Drinkhall can rest easy knowing that Kolish has a long history of taking down the best of the best.
Quadri Aruna was undoubtedly the Atlanta Blazers’ most important pick of the Season 4 MLTT Draft. Their third-round selection, Yuanxinai Yuan, could end up as their most impactful selection if she becomes their main Singles 2 option. But their final pick, Kim Woojin, has the best chance of the three to end up as the most valuable player they chose on Thursday.
Not necessarily in terms of star power or reliability; it’ll be difficult to surpass Aruna and Yuan in either category. But the lefty’s ability to play in both Singles and Doubles provides the Blazers with enough versatility to shake up what was a very rigid roster in Season 3. Former Blazers head coach Suzi Battison wanted to experiment with Yuya Oshima (2779) in Doubles more often last season, but the Blazers were constructed in a way that required Oshima to focus on Singles. Kim’s presence allows Oshima to play wherever the rookie doesn’t play, which makes their lineups much harder to predict for opposing coaches.
This selection was a long time coming for the Blazers. Battison promised Kim that she would select him with the Blazers’ final pick before stepping away from the team, but she was thrilled to know that her successor, Koji Itagaki, saw exactly what she saw in the 24-year-old.
“I talked to [Kim] before myself and I told him … I will pick him [in the] last round,” Battison said. “And that’s what the new coach did. So [it] worked out perfectly.”
Whether or not Kim or any of the above players end up winning MVP or Player of the Week honors next season remains to be seen. But it’s hard to imagine that any of these teams would have expected these players to fall as far as they did.
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