Joe Starkey: Steelers GM Omar Khan pulls off another miracle

8/30/2023
Twenty-three days. That’s how long Kyle Dubas held the record for executing the most ridiculously lopsided trade in Pittsburgh sports history (recent history, anyway).
Omar Khan smashed it to pieces.
I’d still say it’s pretty remarkable that Dubas, the Penguins’ new president of hockey operations, reeled in Norris Trophy-winning defenseman Erik Karlsson for a gently used Mikael Granlund and a nearly expired Jeff Petry, both overpriced underachievers.
I still can’t believe a team, in this case the San Jose Sharks, was desperate enough to make such a deal (and thanks to the Montreal Canadiens for getting involved and picking up Petry). You just don’t see trades that preposterous too often.
We saw one even more preposterous 23 days later.
Somebody traded for Kendrick Green — and it wasn’t for the lowest possible compensation.
Khan somehow extracted a sixth-round pick, not a seventh-rounder, from Texans GM Nick Caserio in exchange for one of the worst Steelers draft picks of the 21st Century and a player the team probably would have cut, anyway.
Let me repeat that, a little louder for those in back: SOMEBODY TRADED A SIXTH-ROUND PICK FOR Kendrick Green!
How, exactly, did that phone conversation go? I’m imagining something like this:
Khan: “Hey Nick, I see you have some injuries up front. Any interest in ... (Khan blushes at the ask) ... Kendrick Green?”
Caserio: “Really? Yes! We almost drafted him. I love him. How about a fifth-round pick?”
Khan: “You’re too generous, Nick. I’ll take a sixth.”
My immediate reaction to the deal — it happened just before 2 p.m. Tuesday — was something akin to what former Penguins defenseman Jan Rutta felt when he found out he was part of the Karlsson trade: “The first couple of minutes, your head is kind of all over the place.”
I thought it was fake news, just as I did when I saw the Karlsson trade. Then I remembered this is the Texans we’re talking about (although they do have more playoff wins than the Steelers over the past 12 years), and Caserio isn’t exactly killin’ it through two seasons. He’s 7-26-1 and already on coach No. 3, having run through one-and-dones David Culley and Lovie Smith.
The deal happened two days after Khan fleeced the Los Angeles Rams in the Kevin Dotson deal, moving up a round in two drafts (2024, ’25) in exchange for Dotson, another player who could easily have been cut. It might not seem like much that the Steelers moved from the fifth to the fourth round in ’24 and the sixth to the fifth the following year, but think about this: If the Rams fall apart again, and that would surprise no one, that fourth-rounder could feel like a late third-rounder.
And of all this comes in the wake of the astonishing Chase Claypool trade, in which Khan acquired what was essentially a first-round pick (32nd overall) for a player who had no future here and might not have much of one anywhere.
As for Green, it’s almost unimaginable that this was the player the Steelers identified as Maurkice Pouncey’s replacement. Green is an undersized lineman who, as we later found out, “really didn’t like playing center.” Shouldn’t that have been one of the first questions at the interview?
Anyway, Green wound up his Steelers career as a short-yardage fullback trying to make the team as a guard, or something like that, and let’s just hand off to Ben Roethlisberger here, because it was Roethlisberger who said it best on his podcast, talking about Green earlier in camp. It’s still hard to believe that Roethlisberger survived, and sometimes even thrived, with the middle of the pocket constantly collapsing on him in his final season, when he was a 39-year-old statue.
Roethlisberger loves Green, who is by all accounts a great guy and a hard worker. But he rightfully pointed out the folly of drafting Green. This was about a month ago, or around the time Green began lining up in the backfield.
“They drafted that guy to be my center,” Roethlisberger said. “Well, last year, he didn’t even dress. And now they have him playing a little bit of fullback. Kevin Colbert and them drafted him to be my center my last year. And now he is playing fullback. But good for Kendrick.”
Good for Omar is more like it.
The Khan Artist strikes again.
(P.S.: Khan has apparently worked another miracle by signing Desmond King off the Texans' scrap heap. Do the Texans' have a scrap heap? The Texans are a scrap heap. How could they let go of an excellent slot corner? King is like the Joe Haden of slot corners — a player who has unexpectedly fallen into the Steelers' laps. Omar for president!).
First Published August 30, 2023, 2:38PM