Andy Reid said the Kansas City Chiefs wanted to retain wide receiver Tyreek Hill but came to a point during contract negotiations where they thought it was no longer feasible.
“I love Tyreek Hill,” Reid said Monday at the NFL meetings in Palm Beach, Florida. The Chiefs last week traded Hill to the Miami Dolphins for five draft picks. “There’s no rift between Tyreek Hill and myself. I thought he deserved an opportunity if that’s where he wanted to go. He’s a family man that has a few kids and he’s got to be able to support them now and down the road, and this gives him an opportunity to do that. At the same time, it gives us great compensation.
“We came in aggressive [with a contract offer], and after we got to a point, we just said, ‘Listen, in this day and age you have issues you have to deal with with the cap.’ So we felt like it was better to allow him to go ahead and be traded. … You can go different routes with a player. You can play hardball or you can go about it the way I did, or we did.”
The Chiefs began the free-agency period with little available salary-cap space. The website overthecap.com now shows the Chiefs with over $23 million in cap space, fourth most in the NFL.
“You’ve got to be able to manage that the right way,” Reid said. “If you’re paying all of your money to a quarterback and you can’t surround him with players, that can be a problem. So you have to find a way with a Tyreek Hill maybe that you have to get rid of so you can replenish. That’s offense and defense. I’m not just talking about the offensive side.”
The Chiefs in free agency added wide receivers Marquez Valdes-Scantling and JuJu Smith-Schuster and running back Ronald Jones on offense. Safety Justin Reid was their significant defensive addition.
The Chiefs also after the Hill trade have two first-round draft picks as well as two selections in each of the second, third and fourth rounds.
Asked how the Hill trade affects quarterback Patrick Mahomes, Reid said, “You want to surround him with great players. We did try to sign Tyreek at a certain cost. Once it gets past that, now you can see what we’re doing here with the players we brought in and we feel they’re very good football players.
“[General manager Brett Veach] is building this thing to where we feel we can win on Sundays.”