The Raiders shopped the contract of receiver Davante Adams for two weeks. On Tuesday, the Jets finalized a deal that sends him from the 2-4 Raiders to the 2-4 Jets.
At the quarterly league meetings in Atlanta, owner Mark Davis discussed the decision to move on from Adams, 37 games into his tenure with the team.
“It’s part of this life in football,” Davis said, with TheAthletic.com. “Players come and go. If things don’t work out, they don’t work out. [G.M.] Tom Telesco did a good job today of making sure that we move forward in the future with as little distraction as possible.”
The word “distraction” underscores the reality that the recent report regarding the Raiders possibly keeping Adams through the end of the year wasn’t anything more than an effort to squeeze the best possible trade terms out of his new team.
Although Davis surely wasn’t happy with the prospect of paying Adams $983,333 per week to not play, Davis said he let Telesco and coach Antonio Pierce handle the situation.
“I leave these decisions up to the General Manager and the head coach,” Davis said. “They make the football decisions. I consult with them and I might play devil’s advocate a lot of times, but they make the decisions and they make the final decision.”
Ultimately, the Raiders assumed none of Adams’s remaining salary. That surely kept them from getting the second-round pick they coveted for Adams — a second-round pick they’ll get only if he becomes a first- or second-team All-Pro.
Given that he has already missed three games this year, he’ll need to have huge numbers in the final eleven games to make the All-Pro team. He has 18 catches for 209 yards and one touchdown to date in 2024. That puts him in a nine-way tie for 76th in the league in receptions. He’s 70th in receiving yards.
Ultimately, the Raiders surrendered a first-round pick and a second-round pick for Adams, while getting back only a third. They also paid him more than $55 million for his 37 games in Las Vegas.
Along the way, they didn’t make it to the playoffs once, amassing a record of 16-24 during Adams’s tenure with the team.
Still, today’s trade counts as lemonade and/or chicken salad. They were going to keep paying him $983,333 per week for 12 weeks, and they would have cut him prior to the start of the 2025 league year, when his massive $35.64 million salary would have hit the books.
