At the trade deadline on Tuesday, Seattle sent 2026 fourth and sixth-round picks to New Orleans in exchange for 4th year receiver Rashid Shaheed.
The Saints have been passing at the 4th highest rate in the league, and Shaheed was averaging a career-low in yards per catch, but was on pace to surpass his previous bests in receptions, yards, and touchdowns.
The biggest question facing him upon his arrival in Seattle – will that production on a bad team translate to similar success in one of the most efficient and balanced offenses in the league?
With a putrid defense and a one-dimensional offense, New Orleans was passing 61% of the time during the first six games of the 2025 season, and that number skyrocketed to 72% in their last three games.
Seattle ranks second-to-last in pass rate at 50%, and this has been consistent throughout the season. Unless they are given a reason to change, they will likely stay on that path.
There is a chance Shaheed might even help the offense become more efficient and drag out drives to keep the defense fresh, but that will depend on his ability to adjust to a run-first offense after playing in a pass-first offense for the first nine games this season.
Shaheed is a very talented player and will be a solid addition to an already effective offense. But before we get super excited about a passing attack suddenly going nuclear in the second half of the season, consider that in 2024, when current Seattle OC Klint Kubiak was running the Saints’ offense, he called pass plays just 57% of the time. They had a very balanced offense that split time with the running attack.
Working in Kubiak’s offense last year for just six games before getting injured, Shaheed finished with 170 routes run as the secondary target in the passing game, finishing with 20 catches for 349 yards.
This season, Shaheed has run 297 routes in nine games, still working as the secondary option. Seattle’s leading receiver, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, is 51st with 215 routes run. In less than a season, Shaheed is running 50% more routes than he did the previous year. The Saints’ primary receiver is Chris Olave, and he has run 328 routes this season, 6th in the league.
To put that in perspective, the Saints’ secondary receiver has run 82 more routes than Seattle’s primary receiver (JSN), and the Saints’ primary receiver (Olave) has run 113 more routes than JSN. And neither receiver has come close to JSN’s league-leading receiving yards. Stats are fun, but efficiency – especially in the winter months – is more critical when the drives start to matter more and points are harder to come by.
Shaheed is 15th in receptions with 44 and 21st in yards with 499. Shaheed is 13th with a 67% catch rate.
Based on these numbers, Seattle is acquiring a very athletic and talented receiver who will put up respectable numbers, but probably won’t be putting up WR1 numbers alongside JSN. The Seahawks don’t put the ball in the air enough for that to happen.
This does not mean that Shaheed cannot be a game-changing deep threat, but it likely means you can’t just take his stats playing for the Saints this season and assume he will be anywhere close to that as a part of Seattle’s offense.
Even if you can plug Shaheed into the offense, you have to consider getting timing down and understanding where you need to be vs where the QB is expecting you to be.
JSN has formed a high-speed connection with QB Sam Darnold, and Shaheed likely just shook his hand and had a brief conversation. Maybe a little film study, but they have only been in the same town for 24 hours. Darnold may build a quick rapport with Shaheed as well, but it’s more likely that it will take a few weeks to get there – and that will mean some frustrating missed deep shots in games, and possibly Darnold avoiding that part of the play being called at times.
We know from his time in Minnesota how successful Darnold can be with an excellent second option, as he routinely worked with Jordan Addison to beat opponents when they game-planned around Justin Jefferson. But can we assume similar production from Shaheed in the middle of the season? Perhaps.
However, it’s more likely that we will see a regression from Shaheed in the new offense, even though he is familiar with the scheme, having played six games in it a season ago.
New Orleans has passed at an average rate of 65% on the season, so if we assume Shaheed will be getting 15% less work in an offense that only passes 50% of the time and only dock his productivity the same 15%, what would that look like?
He would be coming to Seattle with these numbers –
Thirty-eight receptions on 56 targets for 424 yards on 252 routes run for a catch rate of 57%.
That would still be an improvement over Seattle’s current number two receiver, so it makes sense why Seattle made the trade happen when they have a really good shot at a deep playoff run for the first time in years.
Rookie receiver Tory Horton has 13 catches on 22 targets for 161 yards with a catch rate of 59%. Shaheed’s numbers are better, and he’s an experienced veteran even if he has never played a complete season before. These adjusted numbers are just a guess; he may do more, but it’s not likely he does less than that.
Add Shaheed’s speed to the equation, and as long as he can make the defense account for him, it may not matter how many catches or targets he has, as long as he can open things up for his teammates.
Horton ran a 4.41 in the 40-yard dash at the combine in April, and while we don’t have a time from the year Shaheed was drafted, based on his speed during live games, we can guess he would have been faster, and some experts believe it to be in the 4.3 range, which would put him among the fastest players in the league.
We will have to see if playing outdoors the majority of the time has any impact on Shaheed’s speed after playing several games a season indoors previously. More than likely, he’ll need some time to adjust to the sometimes slippery conditions in Seattle, but with the right shoes, he’ll be fine in no time at all. That could be a factor in working out timing with his new QB. As long as some of those deep passes work out, no one is going to spend much time worrying about the ones that don’t.
Shaheed brings more to the offense than just his speed on the perimeter. As effective as Seattle has been running the ball, they might be about to turn the corner and be even more punishing to defenses while opening a whole new level of their offense vertically.
In addition to opening up running lanes by stealing the attention of the best run supporter in the secondary, Shaheed can burn the defense running jet sweeps. He may not excel in every trait expected of a top player, but he has enough skills in his toolbox to be the game-changing chess piece Seattle was looking for.
Shaheed might spend more time running, blocking, and running decoy routes than he’s used to, and perhaps more than he might like, but it comes in an excellent trade-off for him – he will finally know what winning football looks like after three and a half years playing losing football for the Saints.
Now he gets to play successful football for the Seahawks. Welcome to Seattle Shaheed. There’s no speed limit on the field, no matter how many signs you see on the way to the stadium.
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