The paper aims at giving a first insight on the existence/nonexistence of ground states for the L 2 -critical NLS equation on metric graphs with localized nonlinearity. As a consequence, we focus on the tadpole graph, which, albeit being a toy model, allows to point out some specific features of the problem, whose understanding will be useful for future investigations. More precisely, we prove that there exists an interval of masses for which ground states do exist, and that for large masses the functional is unbounded from below, whereas for small masses ground states cannot exist although the functional is bounded.