Good thing first: The Jets did as well as they could have on Saturday, when they finally gave in to the reality of their current situation and sent disgruntled Jamal Adams (and a future fourth-round pick) to Seattle.
The Jets earn two first-round picks, a third round, and safety Bradley McDougald, who will presumably replace Adams on the Jets defensive field. General manager Joe Douglas, who promised he wouldn’t trade Adams unless his jaw dropped, received an award in exchange for a player who clearly didn’t want to be here. In his first decisive moment, Douglas does it well.
Century Link Field is 2,839 miles away from the Jets’ training facility at Florham Park. It is clear that by the time the deal closed, that was barely a distance long enough for both sides to retreat to the neutral corners.
But Douglas’s work is only partially finished now. The difficult part comes later. The tricky part will be maximizing those picks, and the Seahawks, with the help of Adams, won’t make Douglas’s job easier in that regard by reaching the top 10 of the draft in 2021 or 2022. And it isn’t. Simply useful if you do well on those drafts, it’s an imperative.
Otherwise, what the Jets did on Saturday afternoon will be a note-by-note replay of what the Knicks did in the winter of 2018 with their version of Jamal Adams.
His name was Kristaps Porzingis.
On January 31, 2019, after team-player relationships had reached an insurmountable chasm, the Knicks handed Porzingis over to the Mavericks for, in essence, a salary gap (with which they hoped to get a maximum free agent ) and two No. 1 picks (which, similarly, are not likely to be all of those options given that Porzingis has already helped make Dallas a better team than before).
In both cases, the unstoppable young talents had become so disillusioned with dystopian cultures for two teams that chronically lost that they not only demanded exchanges, but made it impossible for teams to choose any other path. The only difference is that Porzingis was coming out of a serious injury, although his performance this year (19.2 points and a rebound of 9.7 per game, while serving as an excellent driver for Luka Doncic) eased concerns about how he would respond. his knee busted.
So, in the span of 20 months, two gifted kids at the top of their game: Adams is 24 years old, twice Pro Bowler and All-Pro last year; Porzingis was 23 years old, after his first season of All-Star, he has decided to leave this city, New York, a sports city that is supposed to be a magnet for the stars, not a repellent.
That’s how disgusting they found their future if they stayed with the Knicks and Jets. And, of course, today it is easy to shake a crooked finger at children, and their impatient ways and impertinent attitudes; Neither Porzingis nor Adams were exactly covered in glory as they walked out the door. Porzingis found out when he returned to the Garden this season; The Jets won’t host Seattle until possibly 2024, but you can already predict what the narrative will sound like in the week leading up to their Dec. 13 game on CenturyLink.
But the fact is, winning in professional sports means finding ways to make your best players happy. It means acquiring players like Porzingis and Adams, not getting rid of them. The Knicks made their deal happy last January and then immediately went into free agency last July, which was supposed to be half the profit; now it’s Rose Rose’s turn to optimize the other assets, those draft picks in 2021 and 2023.
Like Rose, Douglas is not responsible for the apocalyptic story that helped alienate his players. Adams might have tried to make Adam Gase look like a cross between Michael Scott and Rich Kotitie on the clumsy bosses’ sliding scale, but it was essentially the same game Porzingis played last year when he posted the video of himself running after David Fizdale insisted he hadn’t started running yet.
It was a vehicle to accelerate what he wanted.
What both players wanted was something that should be unthinkable: They wanted to get out of New York, look for a sports city that can literally offer the world its brightest lights and biggest stars. The Knicks and Jets should be duty stations. This is not Stillwater, Oklahoma, after all. This is not Bismarck, North Dakota
Maybe Douglas has the assets to make this trade seem like an even bigger heist by the time he finishes working on the 22nd draft. Like Leon Rose, maybe he can find a star or two, a player around whom he’s supposed to be. you can build something. A guy like Kristaps Porzingis, maybe. Or Jamal Adams.
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