The Raiders have already done a lot of roster work this year, and that early push showed up right away with a 3-0 start. But now that Las Vegas sits at .500 entering Week 9, the next layer of the roster picture is getting harder to ignore. The front office has made real progress, yet the recent four-game losing streak exposed where the depth still isn’t good enough.
With the trade deadline only days away, Las Vegas may not be the kind of team that goes shopping aggressively. Still, there are a couple of names worth checking on if the Raiders want to keep improving this season. Two players stand out: Jacksonville wide receiver Brian Thomas and Washington interior defensive lineman Daron Payne.
Thomas is the kind of talent Las Vegas should at least ask about. The Raiders and Jaguars already have a recent trade connection, having worked together last season on the deal that sent Jakobi Meyers to Las Vegas. That alone makes it easy to imagine the two sides picking up the phone again.
The Raiders are still building out their receiver room, and that process may not be finished after this season either, depending on what happens with Tre Tucker. Thomas would fit as another strong piece in that group and could help the offense open up even more.
There’s also a built-in familiarity here. Las Vegas’ current front office got a firsthand look at Thomas last season, and he had the best game of his career against the Raiders. That kind of performance tends to stick in the mind when a deadline gets close.
Payne brings a different kind of appeal, but the logic is just as straightforward. If there’s a proven interior defensive lineman available, the Raiders need to at least find out the price. Payne fits that description, and Las Vegas should see what Washington would ask for him.
He wouldn’t fix everything on defense, but he would give the Raiders a player who could be as good as, if not better than, what they have on the interior right now. That matters more after moving on from Jonah Laulu and with Tonka Hemingway and Thomas Booker dealing with injuries. The unit has thinned out, and that has shown up in the run game.
Stopping the run has been a problem tied directly to that interior group. The Raiders haven’t been able to find multiple defensive linemen who are both durable and dependable, and that has quietly hurt their ability to hold up against the ground attack.
Head coach Klint Kubiak addressed that issue earlier this week after Las Vegas let the New York Jets pile up 140 rushing yards in the first half before holding them to 26 in the second. He said:
“That’s something as a coaching staff and as players and as coaches that we’re working together to fix. It’s not going to happen overnight. Something that is going to take practices, it’s going to take experience, it’s going to take us putting our heads together and having a better product so that we’re not giving up those many yards on the ground,” Kubiak said earlier this week.
“But the people that we have doing it together, our players and coaches, I believe in, and that’s a really important piece of it. We have each other’s back, and the thing I love about our defense is that when things didn’t go well, we kept playing.”
“We got key stops. Made a huge play at the end with [Jeremy] Chinn, and in the NFL, it’s not always going to be pretty.
It’s not always going to be how you wanted it to happen. But at the end of the game, it’s who won the game, and I think as a team we found a way to win.”
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