It’s hard for Mickey Loomis to trade talks when there’s nobody answering the phone, and that may have been the case for the New Orleans Saints and Las Vegas Raiders at Tuesday’s NFL trade deadline. The Raiders announced late Tuesday night that team owner Mark Davis fired everyone at the top of the organization, including head coach Josh McDaniels and general manager Dave Ziegler.
NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reports that the Saints were working on a trade for Raiders wide receiver Hunter Renfrow which fell apart in the hours leading up to the deadline, citing disagreements in which side would have paid more of Renfrow’s salary for the rest of the season. It shouldn’t have been difficult to work that out.
Renfrow is due $3.7 million in weekly game checks the rest of the season, but the Saints could have lowered that number by lowering him to the veteran minimum salary and getting the Raiders to cover the difference; he’s qualified for a $1.08 million base salary, which comes up to about $600,000 for the last ten weeks of the regular season. So the Saints would have paid that and the Raiders would have been on the hook for $2.1 million. Were they really so busy haggling over that number (which is less than 1% of the $224.8 million salary cap) they ran this down to the deadline?
Maybe the sudden layoffs at the top of the Raiders’ organizational chart played a factor. CBS Sports’ Josina Anderson cited a source with a team that was in negotiations with Las Vegas who said the lines of communication fell apart on trade deadline day: “Explains why they ghosted us … Nobody responded yesterday.”
What could the future hold? Renfrow is due a hefty salary in 2024 that will probably make him a cap casualty, and the Saints are clearly interested in him at a near-minimum salary. If he’s willing to sign for that much in the spring and work to reestablish himself as a reliable receiving threat in the NFL, working again with his old quarterback Derek Carr, maybe they’ll circle back to him once he becomes available. But that won’t happen until the season is over and the Raiders have rebuilt their organization yet again.
