Allen Park — The NFL trade deadline used to be boring, largely because it arrived too early in the season. Six weeks into the year was premature for bad teams to concede and become sellers, or needs to crystalize for legitimate contenders.
Business picked up in 2012, when the league pushed its deadline back two weeks. And now it arrives after Week 9, allowing teams to negotiate into early November.
The Lions are no strangers to deadline deals, landing on both the buying and selling ends of the spectrum during the past two decades. Although given the franchise’s longer history of ineptitude, they’ve predictably been sellers more than buyers.
Memorably, former GM Martin Mayhew got off to a running start with his tenure, shipping wide receiver Roy Williams to the Dallas Cowboys for a first-, third- and sixth-round pick in 2009.
Other players the Lions have traded away ahead of the deadline in recent years: linebacker Kyle Van Noy, wide receiver Golden Tate, defensive back Quandre Diggs and T.J. Hockenson.
Van Noy and Diggs were effectively giveaways for late-round picks, deemed poor scheme or culture fits by former regimes. Given the long and productive careers both had after departing, we now know the team was the bigger problem than the player. Frankly, we didn’t need hindsight to reach that conclusion.
The team did better in the Tate and Hockenson deals, getting back Day 2 picks.
In terms of buyers, the Lions picked up a couple of veteran defensive linemen to fill significant voids during the Quinntricia era, dealing for Snacks Harrison in 2018 and Everson Griffin in 2020.
More recently, general manager Brad Holmes has picked up a piece each of the past two seasons, adding depth receiver Donovan Peoples-Jones in 2023 and edge rusher Za’Darius Smith a year ago. The latter effectively patched the massive void created by season-ending injuries to Aidan Hutchinson and Marcus Davenport.
It took weeks to consummate the Smith trade, and it went down to the wire. Months later, Holmes called the process “the most difficult player acquisition journey that I’ve ever dealt with.”
Now that we’re caught up on some deadline history, let’s move to the present day, with deals needing to be done by next Tuesday at 4 p.m.