Tom Brady still isn’t happy the Patriots traded away longtime guard Logan Mankins, but the season is starting and he is moving on.
“I haven’t really spoken to anybody about it,” Brady said Tuesday on his weekly radio show on WEEI. “I have my own personal feelings that obviously are very personal to me. Whatever those are, I just want our team to be the best it can be for this year. I love Logan, Logan was a great friend of mine. Nobody stood for Patriot football more than him. But he’s moved on. I hope he’s happy. We’ll keep in touch.
“We’ve got a game to win. I can’t really think too much about what happened in the past. Like I said, yeah, I dealt with whatever feelings I had last week, but I’ve moved on. I’ve got to move on, because that’s what this team expects me to do.”
The Patriots traded the six-time Pro Bowler to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last week for tight end Tim Wright and a 2015 fourth-round draft pick, a move seen as a cost-cutting measure by New England.
Now, entering his 15th season, Brady has seen the Patriots trade or release several stars from championship teams because of cost concerns, like Lawyer Milloy, Ty Law and Richard Seymour, but all of that experience hasn’t made these situations any easier for the quarterback.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m a very person-to-person type of person. I am a very emotional person. I don’t think those things have ever gotten easier for me. And I don’t think they ever will. But you’ve got to come to grips with it also, and learn to deal with things in a mature way.
“We as players, the business side of things, we’re there to play, we aren’t there to run businesses. We’re there to enjoy the camaraderie with our teammates, enjoy the playing experience with our teammates. We play for one another, and you deal with whatever comes up and then you move forward. I think that’s part of the sport. Being that it’s happened, I know it’s going to happen next year, too, I know it’s going to happen the year after that, the year after that — for as long as you continue playing here you’re going to be dealing with this.”
Brady only hopes he never has to face what his former teammates have.
“There’s nowhere I’d rather play, I know that,” Brady said. “I love playing for this team and I love representing this team. Hopefully I can do that for as long as I can. When I suck, I’ll retire. I don’t plan on sucking for a long time.”