The unprecedented player movement in 2022 can be viewed holistically as a game of dominoes, with one move leading to another, to another and another. Moves and countermoves.
To underscore the point, look no further than the Davante Adams trade to Las Vegas, which came with a new contract that reset the bar for receivers. That move directly led to the Kansas City Chiefs trading star receiver Tyreek Hill to Miami on Wednesday.
Hill's agent, Drew Rosenhaus, told The Joe Rose Show with Zach Krantz on AM 560 Sports in Miami on Thursday that progress was being made in Kansas City on a new deal for the speedy wideout before the Adams deal brought talks screeching to a halt.
"At the end of the season, I started a conversation with the Chiefs on a new contract extension, and it really was heading in the direction of slowly but surely working out a new deal for Tyreek," Rosenhaus said. "And then the Davante Adams trade got done, and Adams got a record-setting contract. And I immediately reviewed that contract, and I spoke to the Chiefs and had a very positive conversation with them that this should be the market for Tyreek. And if it wasn't, then the right thing to do would be for everyone to benefit, which would be for the team to have an unprecedented trade and for Tyreek to go to a team that would be willing to make him the highest-paid receiver."
The timeline meshes with everything we heard leading up to Wednesday's flurry. During free agency, NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport reported that the Chiefs and Hill were working on a new deal that would have made him one of the highest-paid receivers in the NFL.
Ultimately, paying Hill somewhere around $21 million per year and the $28 million per the Raiders handed Adams was a deal-breaker for K.C.
With Hill seeking to top Adams' deal, the Chiefs decided that parting ways would be best for all parties, even if they lost a key wheel of the offense.
"The bottom line is he was in the last year of his contract -- we had actually worked out a restructure that the Chiefs wanted just a week before," Rosenhaus reiterated. "And it really looked like we were going to just continue to work towards a contract extension. ... And then the Adams deal really flipped everything upside down. The Chiefs, I think they had the foresight to see that Tyreek was in the last year of his contract and we weren't going to take a deal that wasn't better than Adams'. So they recognized that this would probably be their last year with Tyreek and this was their opportunity to rebuild at that position. And the Dolphins are a team that is a team trying to get where the Chiefs are."
The Dolphins paid a large sum -- $72.2 million in guarantees -- to pry away the play-making receiver in hopes he can help get them to where K.C. has been.
