PHOENIX — By the time trade talks between the Denver and Miami heated up a month ago, the Broncos already had a keen sense of their target.
Their pursuit of wide receiver Jaylen Waddle didn’t get close to a deal at the trade deadline last fall, but general manager George Paton and the Broncos front office had done extensive background work on the 2021 first-round pick then.
“We felt like we knew the player well and the person even better,” Paton said Monday at the NFL’s spring meetings here.
It led, at the end of about two weeks of talks, to the Broncos acquiring Waddle on March 11 in exchange for their first and third-round picks in this year’s draft plus a swap of fourth-rounders with the Dolphins.
“He’s one of the more explosive playmakers in the league,” Paton said. “Great makeup, great competitor. He’ll fit in with our room. … He just upgrades or helps the room. He opens up the run game, he’ll open it up for other receivers.”
Broncos won’t trade from WR depth after trade
Paton and head coach Sean Payton have consistently been bullish on their existing receivers, repeatedly expressing confidence in the group over the past two years.
Paton on Monday shot down any notion that Denver might look to trade from the position now that Waddle sits at the top of it.
“No, we really like those pieces and they’re all going to help us,” Paton said. “They’ve all helped us up to now. … We’re 7-8 deep. Why would we build up this room then trade someone right now?”
It was confidence in that receiver group that ultimately led the Broncos not to push harder to land Waddle at the trade deadline last year. The depth held up until the playoffs, when Denver played most of its two games without Troy Franklin (hamstring) and Pat Bryant (concussion). At one point against Buffalo in the divisional round, Denver was playing with three healthy receivers.
At the trade deadline, though, the Broncos were a healthy team overall and at receiver.
“We liked the group, we were on a win streak, we were rolling pretty good,” Paton said, adding that at that point, Denver also didn’t know exactly where its first-round pick would be. “And (the price) was high. They were asking a lot at that time.”
A trade ‘too unique’ to pass up
The price stayed high when new general manager Jon-Eric Sullivan arrived at the Dolphins early in the offseason, but Denver became increasingly convinced this was the move they needed to make.
“The more you think about it, the more you go through all of your different models — the cap, the draft picks, who’s available in the draft, free agency, all of that — Who’s available that can really help us?” Paton said. “It had to be a unique circumstance for us to do this, to make a trade like this. And we just felt this was too unique to pass up.”
Paton joked that he may like draft picks more than anybody in the league, but the Broncos decided that the equivalent value of the No. 26 pick in the first round was fair compensation for a player of Waddle’s caliber.
“You look at the caliber of the free agent class,” Paton said. “You look at the caliber of the draft class. Who can we get at 30 within the draft class?’Then you factor in the cap and the finances, not just this year, but down the road. The fact that he’s 27 years old. The fact that it was (No.) 30— it wasn’t No. 16. We compared it to all the other trades the last 10 years with the first-round pick. The value we felt was 26, and thatap the value we gave them.
“You look at all of that when you make a trade like this.”
When Paton called Waddle’s former college roommate, Pat Surtain II, to tell him the deal was done, Surtain already knew.
“He was screaming,” Paton said.
Then he made his way down to the training room to tell quarterback Bo Nix.
He was pretty excited,” Paton said. “He went out to dinner with all of us. Bo thinks he’s kind of a quasi-GM sometimes. Sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s wrong.
“I think he’s right on this guy. This guy is pretty special.”
