Hours before the trade deadline, BMitch & Finlay wondered what, if anything, we could glean about Josh Harris’ future plans for the Commanders based on how he dealt with the James Harden situation and eventually dealing the Sixers’ superstar to the Clippers late Monday night.
Well, we got our answer not long after, because Chase Young and Montez Sweat are gone, and according to reports, Washington ownership had a big hand in making those deals happen as they prep for the future.
“The rebuild is underway and the Josh Harris era is officially beginning,” Grant Paulsen said in the first hour of Tuesday’s Grant & Danny show. “You said after the Sweat deal, Danny, that this was Josh Harris sending a message that we are getting off of this hamster wheel, that the status quo is unacceptable. I wasn't there yet, I thought it was just the right deal to make because you weren't gonna re-sign him. But now we know that if you're Ron Rivera, the hourglass has begun, and if you're this front office, you can't possibly think there's any way you're surviving.”
The Commanders now have five draft picks in the first three rounds, and in Grant’s words, “there’s no way that Harris and his group are going to allow the group that just made the picks that led to 10 snaps on offense and defense for seven drafted players to handle this critical upcoming draft.”
Notebooks closed, pencils down, we have a syllabus, and that’s ‘hitting detonate on the Rivera era.’
“I think it's pretty clear now right that they see what we see, which is that you might back into the playoffs and be the seven seed with an 8-8-1 record or something like that…but so what? That’s the maximum, and we're trying to get off of this ride,” Danny, still feeling the effects of a lost voice, chimed in. “We're trying to take a different course, where the ceiling is much higher and we can be one of these teams that can annually compete and is a step ahead instead of always chasing something that isn't there. This front office seems so content, feeling like they'd arrived and they're so close and all they need is just one little tweak, and it just was unbelievable to you and I to watch them sort of flounder and go from one lily pad to the next without any kind of cohesive plan.”
Today, to Danny, signals the end of that.
“This basically says, no, we’re not doing that; you might win a couple of games and be a half-game out of the wild card hunt or whatever, but that’s not good enough anymore here in year four,” Danny said. “The point is to build a championship contender. You have to go back a little bit in order to get there, so this is smart. This is great.”
Grant agrees, but still can’t believe the Commanders traded BOTH Sweat and Young, given that previous proclivities likely would have seen neither go, to be honest.
“That isn't to say that I'm disappointed or I don't agree with it, I’m just stunned,” Grant said. “We’ve talked for a month about this day, done the call topic 10 times about who you would rather trade or who should they trade, and it was both!”
Even better to the guys? Young comes back to FedEx on December 31 when the Niners will visit the Commanders…and Grant had to have a little fun with one segment from yesterday.
“I’ll be curious to see how many times the Commanders run to that side, and I'm sure he'll be double and triple teamed every time, right?” Danny asked.
“I would say that he would be double and triple teamed as much as normal, which I've been told is around 90 percent of the time,” Grant joked back, tongue in cheek, before adding this last salvo on Young:
“We knew how they felt about Chase Young. When they didn't pick up his fifth year option, you knew that whether it was some of the behind the scenes baggage and things – not his performance – whatever the things that they know and watch and monitor all the time that we don't, or the injury history or just the lack of overall production, they took it on the chin. That was an embarrassing thing for the staff to not pick up the fifth-year option of their first pick, the No. 2 overall selection. From that moment on, he has played much better football and gotten healthier, but the rebuild is on. Pretty stunning.”
