Raiders still hearing offers, but for now see Maxx Crosby as a big addition

PHOENIX – The dust may have mostly settled on the aborted trade between the Las Vegas Raiders and Baltimore Ravens, but that doesn’t mean all is quiet on the Maxx Crosby front.

General manager John Spytek acknowledged his phone lines are active when asked during the league meetings at the Arizona Biltmore whether teams are still calling to inquire about Crosby’s availability.

“We’re getting a lot of interest on a lot of people,” he said. “This is the time of year where there’s deals made before the draft and so there are a lot of exploratory calls made on a lot of the players on our roster, too. So I don’t want to single any one guy out.”

Crosby was traded to the Ravens for a pair of first-round picks on March 6 only for them to back out of the trade four days later after reportedly feeling uncomfortable with his medical examination.

Spytek declined to dive too deep into the process of how the trade broke down.

“I think we all know how trades work and there’s a process that you have to go through and I took the information as it came,” he said. “But I knew we were organizationally in a great place that no matter what the result was that we would be OK and to me that was the most important part.

“I don’t really have an opinion on how it played out. Just that Maxx is back and it’s like he never left. He’s working his (butt) off to get healthy and he’ll be ready to rock by training camp to play a bunch of good football for many years to come.”

While the Ravens had a right by rule to withdraw from the trade, the franchise’s reputation has taken a bit of a hit from skeptics who saw a decision based on cold feet more than the cold hard facts of the imaging.

It’s something to which Ravens team president Sashi Brown admitted being aware.

“I don’t want to at all downplay the experience that Maxx had, that we all had,” he said Monday. “Raiders, Ravens, Maxx, our locker room. As (general manager Eric DeCosta) said, we were incredibly excited and just as equally, if not more, disappointed that we weren’t able to pull off that transaction and bring Maxx to Baltimore. I’m not going to go too much deeper into that.”

Brown hopes any reputational damage won’t be lasting.

“We’ve got strong, long relationships across the league,” he said. “We have emphasized the importance of doing things the right way and will continue to do that. We understand it’s a headline story because of its profile and significance. We believe our relationships, to the extent you need time to repair them, people understand who we are and what we’re about. Our locker room understands that as well. But when you have high-profile transactions and opportunities like this, it’s unfortunate but sometimes these things do happen.

“No fault of Maxx’s certainly, or ours or the Raiders. It’s just kind of where it played out.”

The end result was Crosby being back with the Raiders, at least for now.

While that may have been initially shocking, Spytek said the organization was able to quickly pivot to fitting Crosby into the plan that had been put in place with multiple big-money signings in the few days Crosby had been in Baltimore.

He doesn’t think the voided trade really changed much of the offseason plan.

“Just from the timing of it, it really didn’t,” he said. “Because we did what we did on Monday, and then (the withdrawn trade) was Tuesday. But we had a lot of cap space amd we had a lot of cash made available to us by (Mark Davis) and the ownership group to be aggressive and try to build the team the best way possible. I would echo what (coach Klint Kubiak) said, ‘It was just like we got another elite defensive end in free agency.’”

Still, the Raiders could have changed their mind and exercised their own option to reneg on some of the contract agreements that had not yet been signed.

They chose instead to honor all of them.

“We never would operate like that,” he said of not backing out. “We targeted the guys we wanted to. We gave them what we felt were good deals. We added what we thought were really good football players, so we were in a place to keep them all. I don’t know what we would have done if it would have been different, but we wouldn’t have walked out of any of those deals, either.”

He doesn’t believe there will be any lingering resentment between Crosby and the organization despite the relationship having previously frayed to the point a trade was necessitated.

Spytek has said repeatedly he and Crosby have had an open line of communication, including when they disagreed over how to manage Crosby’s reps down the stretch last season with the Raiders trying to earn the No. 1 pick in the draft.

“Maxx and I have continued to have great conversations since then and I know him and Klint have had a lot of great conversations too,” Spytek said. “We just try to tell each other the truth and not have a lot of mystery and unknowns. I think Maxx and Klint and I will continue to operate that way.”