For the third time in five years, the most significant move of the Chiefs’ offseason requires trading away an All-Pro.
It’s tough.
It’s somber.
But I’ll add one more: It’s ideal business in the NFL.
The Chiefs agreed to trade All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for first-, third-, fifth- and sixth-round draft picks. The third-rounder will arrive in the 2027 draft. The others come immediately, with the first-rounder sitting at No. 29 overall.
Why? How did it get here?
It’s a wide lens before a narrow focus.
The NFL’s salary cap is a league friend but a team-specific enemy. It is designed to provide an ever-present level playing field by putting teams in these types of either-or corners. The team in Kansas City might have tilted those scales for seven years, the anomaly in a league that prefers trends, but it’s not immune to the aftermath — heck, the Chiefs are even more likely to endure the consequence.
Which is this: The roster is in a worse spot than it was 24 hours ago. The locker room, too.
Those are the wrong comparisons to make.
McDuffie is on the verge of being the highest-paid cornerback in the NFL when he arrives in Los Angeles, per multiple reports, topping $30 million per year. That necessitates cap space the Chiefs do not have.
The decision was not whether they prefer McDuffie or prefer the picks. It’s whether they would prefer to let a top-flight cornerback play one final year at $13 million (which ignores the possibility of a holdout, by the way) and then let him walk for free — or if they’d prefer to get something back for him before he leaves.
The Chiefs got four picks, a premium return, for one year of McDuffie, not in exchange for the career of McDuffie. The total value of those four picks equates to about the 20-21st overall pick, which, ironically, is where the Chiefs drafted McDuffie four years ago.
Ahem, the ideal.
They ought to just turn it over this way every four years, right? Draft the right player, help develop him into an All-Pro and then recoup future assets when he gets expensive. Easy enough, yeah?
The noted pitfall — the reality — is the difficulty of nailing the draft. It’s a prerequisite to what the Chiefs did Wednesday, because nobody is sending picks to Kansas City for a bust, and the draft can sometimes feel more like a lottery than a science.
But the draft is only half of the makeup of the ideal circumstances.
The Chiefs just completed the other half. They gave themselves more opportunities to nail the draft.
The only reason the Chiefs have Trent McDuffie — err, had Trent McDuffie — is because they followed a similar path once before. They traded All-Pro wide receiver Tyreek Hill, as good as just about anyone in the league at the time, in exchange for a collection of draft picks in 2022. One of those picks allowed the Chiefs to trade up to select McDuffie weeks later.
He was part of a talent-rich class that transformed into the supporting cast of two more Super Bowls and a third appearance. That group had known nothing but playing into February until the 6-11 downswing last season.
But let me remind you of some additional picks in that same draft class: Skyy Moore, Joshua Williams, Darian Kinnard and Nazeeh Johnson. That’s a receiver with 600 career yards in four seasons, two cornerbacks with a combined one interception between them and a tackle who never played an offensive snap in Kansas City.
You know why we don’t talk much about that group? Because the Chiefs had a surplus of picks to make up for the busts and the semi-busts. They had more tickets to throw in the lottery, and they cashed those. They used them on McDuffie, George Karlaftis, Bryan Cook, Leo Chenal, Jaylen Watson and Isiah Pacheco.
It’s a terrific class. But it had help in getting there.
After trading McDuffie on Wednesday, the Chiefs have more draft capital in 2026 than they did in 2022. They actually have more valuable draft capital than they did in 2013, when they had the No. 1 overall pick (but didn’t have a second-round pick).
Four years ago, the Chiefs took control of their future assets before the circumstances took control of them.
That’s the path they just repeated.
They are not built like other teams in that priority. They’ve not had the track record of other teams.
The Rams are all-in now.
Half the league is building for the future at the detriment of the present.
The Chiefs? They’re trying to win with Patrick Mahomes — while recognizing that Mahomes extends the championship window beyond the all-in immediacy. It’s a tightrope and a path that, if anything, they could have repeated before now.
But they can’t change yesterday’s moves today, and nor would Trey Smith or Nick Bolton have recouped the kind of haul McDuffie did. When the Chiefs traded All-Pro guard Joe Thuney a year ago, it netted them a fourth-round pick.
The entire league could use McDuffie, though it still demanded finding the landing spot, a needle that is harder to thread than it might appear on paper. The interested party had to have a need at cornerback, the cap space to pay the cornerback $30 million and the priority to win now.
Two teams emerged in the talks, I’m told: the Rams, who want to maximize the years (or even just one year?) quarterback Matthew Stafford hast left; and the Giants, who presumably want to make a splash after hiring John Harbaugh this offseason.
The Chiefs held out for more than the Rams’ 29th overall pick, an offer that moved from the 1-yard line to the end zone when the Rams included this year’s fifth- and sixth-round selections and a 2027 third.
Trent McDuffie’s future is now in Los Angeles, inside his home state of California. The Chiefs’ future resembles what brought him to Kansas City in the first place.
The surplus of picks.
It’s half the path they created in 2022, the hidden part of it.
The other half is the part visible to all of us: They have to make the picks count just the same.