Ward Thinks 49ers Should Have Found a Way to Keep Buckner

This week, a reporter asked Jimmie Ward, a team captain, if he was surprised when the 49ers traded Buckner.

Grant Cohn | Oct 19, 2021

This weekend, the 49ers will face a player they never should have traded: DeForest Buckner.

He should be on the 49ers right now. Instead, the 49ers traded him to the Indianapolis Colts in 2020 so they could keep Arik Armstead and draft Javon Kinlaw and Brandon Aiyuk.

Not a good trade. Kinlaw has been injured since the 49ers drafted him and Aiyuk is buried deep in the Kyle Shanahan's doghouse for no apparent reason.

This week, a reporter asked Jimmie Ward, a team captain, if he was surprised when the 49ers traded Buckner. Ward always speaks his mind, even if it's to criticize his own organization.

He clearly didn't like the Buckner trade.

Here's what Ward said.

WARD: "You know what Buckner brought to this team. He was the heart and soul when he was here. I wasn't happy about it, but I understood the business side, and I'm pretty sure y'all knew something was going to happen just like I did. Just didn't know what was going to happen. And when that happened, it was bittersweet. We ended up getting Javon Kinlaw and Brandon Aiyuk, but we lost a leader on this defense, on this team, in this building. That's still my brother and I still love him.

Q: You said you knew something was going to happen. You mean financially?

WARD: "Yeah, couldn't keep everyone. But maybe, I don't know, they probably could have made it work somehow. The Rams keep doing it. I don't know how. You know where they're getting all this money from? Like I said, it's the business side of it."

Published Oct 19, 2021

GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.