Will the Jets trade Jamal Adams?

[Toro]

Getty Images

The Jets have a decision to make. It’s too early to know what it will be.

With safety Jamal Adams wanting out and willing to be traded to eight different teams (and maybe eventually more), the Jets could end up getting a strong offer, if more than one of the eight teams are interested in Adams. For good measure, the Jets need to push the idea that they’re not trading Adams; if they can sell that to an interested suitor, they may be able to shake a sweetened pot from a team that wants Adams.

It will be important for Adams to play along. It’s no secret in league circles that Adams, undeniably an elite player, can be hard to handle. The team that trades for him and pays him won’t want to risk being on the receiving end of similar treatment, sooner or later, that the Jets currently are receiving.

The Jets also need to be concerned about the precedent that letting Adams go could set. No team wants current or future players to think that they can talk or tweet their way out of town. The Jets will need the same kind of trade offer that will get them to do what the Jaguars did with Jalen Ramsey. The Jaguars wanted to keep Ramsey, but in the end they weren’t going to reject an offer of two first-round picks and a second-round pick.

The question becomes will the best offer the Jets get for Adams (it definitely won’t be two ones and a four) be enough to get a deal done? If so, the question then becomes whether a new team will trade for Adams without a new contract (like the Rams did with Ramsey) or whether it will insist on a long-term extension before finalizing the transaction.

Adams, like Antonio Brown early last year, is showing that players have more power than they realize. Given the way things turned out for Brown and the Raiders, however, the team that trades for Adams will want to know it’s not inheriting someone else’s problem.

This means that the team that decides to try to trade for Adams will need to figure out exactly what went wrong between player and team over the last three years. The hardest part could be getting to the unvarnished truth, because neither Adams nor the Jets will want his potential new team to be scared off by whatever happened to poison the relationship so quickly.