Tracking the outcome of every trade made by Lions’ GM Brad Holmes, what trades turned into what players?

Last year we were looking for inspiration for something to write about the Detroit Lions on a Friday a few weeks before camp. That’s sort of what you have to do that time of year. 

The idea was go back and look at every in season and offseason trade that Lions GM Brad Holmes has made during his time with the Lions and try to track the total outcome of each one. We got a lot done last June. Now that the 2024 NFL Draft is over, we can continue to see where some of these trades have taken the team. Let’s jump into what we have. 

The Matthew Stafford trade

A ton has been made of this trade at the end of the day. This will be the one I go into the least detail on because of that. The one thing that needs to be noted is that the Lions traded Matthew Stafford to the Rams and the Rams essentially traded back an entire offense to the Lions. Here’s the full results of that trade.

The Michael Brockers trade

This the second move that Brad Holmes makes and this is the only straight forward trade out there. The Lions got one player out of it and that’s it. Brockers gave the Lions two seasons and they released him. The Rams used the 7th round pick they got from the Lions and moved it around a bunch until they got three draft picks out of it. Not bad for them. Of course one of those picks is Stetson Bennett. Here’s how it all turned out.

The Trinity Benson trade

This one didn’t make a lot of sense at the time and I still didn’t understand it years later. After sifting through the aftermath of the trade, I see it now. Here’s what happened.

Ok, hold on tight to the cross bar. Here we go. The Lions would wind up taking that 183rd pick and trading it back to Denver along with the 63rd pick in the draft in exchange for a 3rd and 5th round pick. They wound up using that 3rd round pick for Hendon Hooker and then moved that 5th round pick around until it became Brodric Martin. More on that later. So at the end of the day, here’s what that trade has fully produced for each team. 

The T.J. Hockenson trade

The Lions took that 55th pick and moved it to Kansas City in exchange for a 2nd (63), 4th(122) and 7th round pick (249). They took the 63rd pick and moved it to Denver along with that 183rd pick that they got in the Trinity Benson trade and got back the 68th and 139th picks. The 68th pick wound up being Hendon Hooker. They moved the 139th pick, along with the 122nd pick they got from KC, to Arizona for the pick that would wind up being Brodric Martin. 

Then there’s 249. The Lions would move 249 to Philadelphia as a part of the D’Andre Swift trade. They got back the 219th pick and a 2025 4th round pick. They would use the 219th pick to select Antione Green. Are you still with me? Here’s the end game. 

Now that the 2024 NFL Draft is over, we can finally wrap this one up. The Lions took that third round pick they got from the Vikings and packaged it in a trade with their 29th pick to move up in the first-round of this years draft to get Terrion Arnold. 

They also traded that 2025 fourth round pick they got from the Eagles, in the Swift trade, back to the Eagles to move up and get Sione Vaki.

On the Vikings side of things, they took that conditional fourth round pick from the Lions and used it as part of their trade up package for J.J. McCarthy.

The Jeff Okudah trade

This is the last trade of the day that we can fully track. The Lions would take that 159th pick and the 48th pick and move it to Green Bay in exchange for the 45th pick. They would use that pick to select Brian Branch. So here’s how that turned out. 

The Trades we have to wait on or are done

The first one is the Riley Patterson trade. The Lions sent a conditional seventh-round pick to the Jaguars for Patterson.

The tough thing with this one is that we don’t really know what the condition were with the seventh round pick in 2026 and we might not know for a while now. So it’s hard to track anything beyond this. 

What we do know is that Patterson didn’t play out the full season with the Lions. He was released in December. That might have some bearing on the pick. We’ll update this piece as soon as we know. 

The next one is the the Denzel Mims trade. The Lions traded a conditional 2025 sixth-round pick to the Jets for Mims and a conditional seventh-round pick. Since Mims didn’t make the roster, the terms of the trade were voided and nobody lost anything. 

The final is the Donovan Peoples-Jones trade. The Lions sent a 2025 sixth-round pick to the Browns for Donovan Peoples-Jones. That’s it for now on that. Next year we’ll see what the Browns do with the pick, but we now everything there is to know from the Lions side.