On Saturday, Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) and Punjab Kings (PBKS) faced off in an epic powerplay slugfest. SRH scored 105 for no loss in their first six overs, and PBKS replied with 93 for no loss.
The result ended up hinging on what the two teams did in their other 14 overs, but there is little chance PBKS could have pulled off a chase of 220 had they not come close to matching SRH's powerplay.
This is how the IPL looks in 2026. For the first time in the tournament's history, the average scoring rate in the first six overs has gone past 10 an over. As things stand, the overall powerplay run rate in IPL 2026 is 10.47, almost a run an over better than IPL 2025's 9.59.
Which brings us, naturally, to Sunday night's clash at the Wankhede Stadium, where Phil Salt, Rajat Patidar and Tim David, all scoring in excess of two runs a ball, powered Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) to a total of 240 for 4.
If Mumbai Indians (MI) were to get anywhere near that target, they would have needed a blistering powerplay. They didn't have a bad one in absolute terms, but 62 for no loss (with Rohit Sharma retired hurt) wasn't going to cut it on this day. By the time the seventh over began, they already needed close to 13 an over.
That powerplay encapsulated what has felt like a worrying trend for MI.
Since the start of the 2025 season, teams have scored 70-plus runs in the powerplay on 37 occasions, including RCB's 71 for no loss on Sunday. MI have only done it twice.
Over the last season and a bit, there has been a clear divide in the IPL. Five teams are responsible for 31 of the 37 powerplay scores of 70 or more. The other five teams have cobbled together six such scores.
That MI sit among the bottom five teams here is just one facet of what seems like a bigger story.
In their pomp, MI were trendsetters in the IPL. When they last won the tournament in 2020, they did so with what seemed like the perfect team. They had the best powerplay bowler in the tournament and the best death-overs bowler (who happened to be handy pretty much everywhere). They had six-hitters all the way down the order, and their finishers, Kieron Pollard and the Pandya brothers, made up by far the best collection of finishers in the tournament. They hit 137 sixes that season, 32 more than the next-best team.
Fast-forward to 2026, and many of the 2020 names are still part of MI's squad. The big four Indian superstars - Rohit, Suryakumar Yadav, Hardik Pandya and Jasprit Bumrah - are still around. Trent Boult is still around, and still a regular at 36. Quinton de Kock is still around, and would be a starter if Ryan Rickelton, an uncannily similar player, wasn't playing ahead of him.
Rickelton is 29. The youngest of the others listed above, Bumrah, is 32.
It's natural in sport for highly successful groups of players to remain together for a long time. And in the IPL, this has been a recipe for success. MI know this well. As do Chennai Super Kings (CSK), who won three of their five titles (2018, 2021 and 2023) with a team widely derided as Dad's Army.
The IPL has changed dramatically since CSK's last triumph, though, with scoring rates shooting through the roof thanks to the nature of the pitches, the introduction of the Impact Player, and the fact that young, homegrown batters now come to the tournament ready to hit sixes against international-quality bowling.
Given those factors, experience no longer seems to hold as much currency as it used to.
And in MI's specific case, continuity seems to have come at a cost. Go back to the lead-up to the last mega auction, before IPL 2025, and specifically to MI's retentions. It would have been extremely difficult - perhaps even impossible - for them to have let go of any of Rohit, Suryakumar, Hardik and Bumrah. It also made perfect sense for them to retain Tilak Varma, one of India's brightest young batting talents.
But you can't keep hold of everyone; look at the two names listed here under "big players not retained" - David and Ishan Kishan.
Kishan was then 26, a relentless boundary-hitter in the top-order when on song, a wicketkeeper, and a player who had played all three formats for India. He wasn't going through the best of times, but there was little doubt about his ability.
David had played three seasons for MI and had looked like the natural successor to Pollard as perhaps the world's most dangerous finisher.
Both ended up elsewhere. Kishan is now interim captain at SRH, and was a key player in India's victorious T20 World Cup campaign earlier this year. David is at RCB, and has almost unarguably been the most dangerous death-overs hitter in the IPL since his switch of teams.
Among all batters in the IPL who have scored at least 100 runs in this phase since the 2025 season, only Marcus Stoinis (286.84) has a better strike rate than David's 235.41.
Seven batters with that 100-runs cut-off have achieved 200-plus death-overs strike rates in this period. None of them play for MI. MI have three batters just outside that group: Naman Dhir (196.84), Hardik (189.39) and Sherfane Rutherford (183.95).
This pattern holds true beyond the death overs too. Of all batters with at least 200 runs in the IPL since 2025, MI's quickest-scoring batter, Dhir, has struck at 176.7.
And Dhir doesn't face a lot of balls - his highest score in this period is 48. Of all MI batters with at least one fifty in the IPL in this period, Suryakumar (165.92) has been the quickest scorer. Compare that to Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, Abhishek Sharma and Priyansh Arya, who have struck at 190-plus and scored a century and three fifties each.
Individually, MI's big four remain formidable players. Since his T20I retirement, Rohit has gone on to improve what had till then been a patchy output in the IPL. Hardik remains one of the best allrounders in the world, even if his real value doesn't shine through quite as much when the Impact Player is involved. Bumrah is Bumrah. Suryakumar's scoring rate and scoring zones no longer stand out from the crowd like they used to, but most teams would still take a No. 3 or 4 who has struck at 160-plus and averaged over 50 since the start of 2025.
Around those four names, however, MI haven't really signed established names or unearthed young players who play a futuristic brand of T20. In effect, they have stood somewhat still while other teams in the IPL have overtaken them, particularly on the batting front.
As damning as that seems, we are still only four games into this season, and MI are past masters at recovering from poor starts. There's still every chance they can fight their way into the playoffs this year. Even if they do pull that off, however, they might need to have some difficult conversations as they plan for the longer term.