NFL trade deadline ratings: Davante Adams from Raiders to Jets

Let’s evaluate each big deal ahead of the 2024 NFL trade deadline, which ends November 5 at 4:00 p.m. ET. I’ll start with the Las Vegas Raiders sending wideout Davante Adams to the New York Jets, reuniting Adams with the quarterback he starred with during his time with the Green Bay Packers.

I am a big advocate of making decisions based on the information available at the time. The saying “let’s see how it turns out” isn’t an option for general managers making deals for their teams. So why should we do it when evaluating these transactions? So when I evaluate trades, I evaluate them for each team based on on-field impact, cap impact, draft compensation, and impact in the context of a team’s overall short- and long-term prospects. I like to think about decisions on two axes:

Both will play a role in our grades, although a decision with little impact may still receive a good or bad grade. Low stakes, clear wins or losses are still important. I’ll be reviewing more offers over the next two weeks as they become available:

New York Jets get: WR Davante Adams
Las Vegas Raiders received: Conditional third-round pick
Trade date: Oct 15

Grade for the Jets: A-
Grade for the Raiders: B-

It actually happened: The Jets reunited Davante Adams with Aaron Rodgers despite a 2-4 start and the firing of their coach a week ago. And guess what? It was the right step.

The Jets had pushed their odds pretty high, with hopes of a Super Bowl appearance before the 40-year-old Rodgers ends his career. The Bulls case remained the same on Tuesday as it did last season: a future Hall of Fame quarterback paired with an elite defense. The problem? The offense wasn’t good enough. Rodgers is no longer the MVP he was a few years ago, and the team needed another good pass catcher in addition to Garrett Wilson. Enter Adam. At this point, what’s the point of filling the pot with a few more chips anyway?

However, there are legitimate questions about who exactly the Jets are getting. At his peak, Adams was the best wide receiver in the NFL. He led the NFL with 3.1 yards per route run and 18 touchdowns in 2020, the latter despite playing in 14 games. He also recorded an open score of 99, the highest possible score in our receiver metrics. In 2021 and 2022 — his final season in Green Bay and then his first season as a Raider — he still put up huge numbers: He averaged 2.7 yards per route run (third-best) and had more than 3,000 receptions yards. His open score remained at Elite 85 and 81, respectively, in these two seasons.

In 2023, we began to see the first signs of Adams’ decline. His yards per route run dropped to 2.0 and his open score fell to 71. Those two numbers further dropped to 1.8 and 64, respectively, in the three games he played this season. While the decline in yardage is in some ways due to the decline in quarterback quality, the open score is intended to take into account the quarterback on the field. The signs of his apparent decline are coming at an age (he turns 32 in December) when we would expect them.

At this point, Adams is probably a top-15 or top-20 wide receiver. However, he is also worth more to the Jets than any other team. Chemistry with Rodgers seems elusive at this point; Somehow, Rodgers and Wilson struggled to connect at times while Allen Lazard, a much worse receiver who spent years with Rodgers, thrived. New York has no more time to lose.

It’s perhaps ironic that some of the Jets’ recent dysfunction has come from Rodgers ceding too much control, and yet the rational move at this point was to give in to what he (almost certainly) wanted by taking over Adams wanted.

The offense, which looked much better in Monday’s 20-23 loss to the Bills after the team replaced Nathaniel Hackett with Todd Downing as playcaller, will be better with Adams. According to ESPN’s Football Power Index, the Jets are the 11th-best team as of Tuesday morning and have a 46% chance of making the playoffs. They have a 4% chance of reaching the Super Bowl. Those projections will likely increase with the acquisition of Adams.

The cost of acquiring Adams is not too high. A third-round pick who can only become a second-rounder if things go very well – Adams would have to be an All-Pro or active for the AFC title game or the Super Bowl. The Raiders aren’t eating up any part of his salary, so the Jets will pay a prorated portion of the roughly $17 million in cash he’s due this year. That’s a good price for him with 11 games left.

Adams may not remain a Jet past 2024, but the organization has to be okay with making this deal a rental because that could very well be the case. He is expected to earn more than $36 million in cash in 2025. So if the Jets can’t negotiate a new contract with him by then, they would probably cut him. That’s still fine: The point of this deal is to improve the Jets at the moment.

By far the most likely outcome of all this is that we end up looking back on this deal like we were a burnt third-round pick by the Jets. But that’s not what this trade is about for them: they’re gambling on the upside, the less likely scenario in which a few drops go their way. In the world where that happens, Adams could absolutely be the player they need to succeed.

play

What to make of the Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams reunion?

Adam Schefter reports on the Jets’ trade for Davante Adams and his reunion with Aaron Rodgers after the two previously played with the Packers.

As for the Raiders, I want to make it clear that the B-minus grade is solely for their decision making today. Their entire Adams trade saga deserves an F for the obviousness of the team’s mistake. Adams has long been an aging and declining player on a bad team with a valuable contract, and it was just the franchise’s stubbornness not to trade him before this season, or the last trade deadline, or the offseason before that. The delay was costly: Vegas could have gotten far more in return 12 months ago. Instead, it held on to sell him for less now while keeping him out of a playoff spot as a result.

However, once the Raiders found themselves in the position they were in on Tuesday – with a lackluster team and a 32-year-old star receiver who wants out – dealing him out is obviously the right move. Whatever the best price they could get was the best price they could get. Still, they should have attempted to cover Adams’ salary in exchange for additional compensation (if that was offered to them).

According to OverTheCap.com, the Raiders have $26 million in 2024 cap space and $80 million in 2025 cap space. They may not have been able to use all of the cap space efficiently and this offered them the opportunity to obtain additional draft capital to convert Adams’ salary into a bonus they paid. I won’t be overly critical of this point because we don’t know if that’s what the Jets wanted – their cap situation isn’t all that different, although big contracts loom for Sauce Gardner and Wilson. We also don’t know if they would have offered fair compensation, but repaying Adams’ deal would have been Las Vegas’ preference. If the Raiders kept other teams (Buffalo?) out of negotiations because they wouldn’t cover Adams’ salary, completing this deal was even more costly.