The Lions traded Golden Tate in October, all but signaling they were done competing for the postseason in 2018.
Bob Quinn hadn't spoken publicly about the deal until Friday.
Here's what the Lions general manager said about moving his leading wide receiver to the Eagles:
On how wanting to win now and trading WR Golden Tate correlate: “In my position, I always have to have a short-term view on things and a long-term view. And just to kind of give a little background on the Golden Tate trade, I got a lot of calls on Golden in August during training camp, a lot of teams were interested in him. Nobody really came up with a good enough offer. Really, the offers were really insulting back in august, so we kept him on the team. The trade deadline comes, you talk to other teams the previous weeks and really nothing happened until really the morning of the trade deadline and Philadelphia called and their offer at 8 a.m. in the morning changed by 9:30 a.m. and I think we consummated the trade at 10:30 a.m. So, it’s one of those things where it was just an offer that we really couldn’t refuse for what the value was and for what we had left with the player, which was eight games, and we felt we had a balanced offense at that time so that’s why we made it.”
On if the overall record had any impact on the WR Golden Tate and DT Damon Harrison Sr. trades: “I, really on those decisions midseason trades, I had to take that kind of out of the equation. I just have to do what’s best for the team at that point keeping the short-term, obviously, in focus but have the long-term, obviously, kind of looking ahead and see what we need for the future.”
On if he underestimated WR Golden Tate’s impact on the offense: “I’ll never underestimate what Golden brought to this team. I think Golden did great things for this team on and off the field. Really, like when you think about the couple weeks after, we had—his replacement was Bruce Ellington for a while and he had pretty good production for those couple of weeks. I know Bruce got hurt towards the end of the year. I will never underestimate what Golden did. He was great player, he’s a great guy and I communicated with him after the trade, so no.”
Quotes provided by the Detroit Lions staff
