Less than two weeks ago, Seahawks general manager John Schneider wasn’t ready to rule out trading cornerback Richard Sherman. But with the draft having passed since then, it appears the team’s chance to deal the four-time Pro Bowler has gone by the wayside.
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As a guest on the “Brock and Salk” show on 710 ESPN Seattle on Thursday, head coach Pete Carroll addressed the odds of a Sherman trade, saying (via Sheil Kapadia of ESPN.com): “I don’t think anybody’s going to offer us anything that would make it worthwhile, because there’s no draft involved and all that kind of stuff. But that’s always out there. There’s always opportunities to trade. But the likelihood is like zero percent, it seems like. Teams don’t want to give up stuff. They don’t want to trade at times like this, and it’s really hard to navigate through a trade with experienced players during draft time. It just doesn’t happen very often.”
While Sherman and the Seahawks had mutual interest in parting ways earlier this spring, no one was willing to meet the club’s asking price (reportedly a first-round pick this year and a conditional mid-rounder in 2018). Now, there’s “no animosity at all” between the two sides, according to Carroll, who believes his relationship with the 29-year-old is “as good as it’s ever been.” To Carroll, shopping Sherman was an example of the Seahawks doing their due diligence.
“We don’t want to trade guys,” he said. “We want to keep our guys. But we have to in an effort to always work to be better and help our team. We’ve got to listen and all that. So we went through that process. There was very open conversation about that.”
Now that Sherman will return to helm the Legion of Boom again in 2017, Carroll noted that the Seahawks need “to continue to dig into [Sherman] and make sure that he’s really at the height of his game, intensity-wise.” Sherman wasn’t necessarily at the height of his game, performance-wise, in 2016, but he still served as a top-notch defender. In the fifth straight 16-start season of his career, the six-year veteran tallied four interceptions and 13 passes defensed, and ranked among Pro Football Focus’ 15 best corners.