The Green Bay Packers finished at 11-6 in 2024, a two-game improvement over the previous season and, despite losing to the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Wild Card playoff round, a good sign for the team as it pushes to get back into contention after the end of the franchise’s Aaron Rodgers era. The Packers won the Super Bowl only one time in the 14-year stretch of Rodgers’ Green Bay career under center, but got to the postseason 12 times, including five trips to the conference final.
In the two years behind 2020 first-round draft pick (26th overall) Jordan Love, the Packers managed to get into the postseason both years, winning one of three playoff games. But Love has often struggled, throwing 11 interceptions in each of his two full seasons as the Green Bay quarterback. He threw 25 touchdown passes in 2024, ranking him 11th in the league and representing a drop of seven from 2023.
Love is clearly a developing quarterback and can use help from his receivers, who ranked a respectable though not elite 11th in the NFL in 2024 according to Sharp Football Analysis.
Would Packers Team Tucker Kraft With Patriots Tight End?
Now, in a new trade proposal, the Packers may look to upgrade their tight end position by engineering a trade with the New England Patriots for nine-year veteran Hunter Henry, who grabbed 66 receptions last season to lead the Patriots receiving corps, in a tie with wide receiver Demario “Pop” Douglas who also saw 66. That total also tied Henry with the Washington Commanders Zach Ertz for sixth among all NFL tight ends.
That is a noteworthy ranking for Henry considering that the Patriots receiving corps as a whole caught the 11th-fewest passes in the league. Patriots receivers placed dead last in total receiving yards with 2,295, the only team to catch fewer than 3,000 yards worth of passes. Henry, however, accounted for 674 of those yards, ranking him eighth among all NFL tight ends.
Henry’s reliability combined with the shakiness of the New England wide receiver corps made Henry the favorite target of rookie quarterback and No. 3 overall draft pick Drake Maye, as well as of veteran Jacoby Brissett who started at QB for the first five weeks of the season. New England quarterbacks targeted the 6’5″, 249-pound tight end 97 times, 10 times more than Douglas, who was the Patriots’ second-most targeted receiver.
The Packers tight end corps was led in 2024 by 2023 third-round draft pick (78th overall) Tucker Kraft, who according to an analysis by SI.com was the only worthwhile tight end in the Green Bay locker room.
“Itâs Tucker Kraft and everyone else,” write SI.com analyst Bill Kuber. “That Kraft is the teamâs No. 1 tight end is obvious.”
Henry One of Patriots’ Few Tradeable Players
Would Green Bay be willing to part with a third or fourth-round pick to take some of the burden off of Kraft and give Love more options? According to an analysis publihsed on Monday by Bleacher Report, Hunter is one of New England’s few tradeable assets on a team that finished 4-13 and desperately needs multiple roster upgrades if new head coach Mike Vrabel is to have any hope of leading the team back toward the playoffs.
“The Patriots should be looking to upgrade the weapons surrounding Drake Maye,” wrote B/R, adding that trading the team’s top tight end would “give them more roster flexibility and even more future draft capital.” For a team in a deep rebuilding stage, those two efforts are more important than any player who could come back in return.
Before the 2024 season, Henry signed a new three-year contract with the Patriots worth $27 million.
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