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Four bold thoughts on the 49ers’ quiet trade deadline — everything it means and everything that caused it, starting with …

If you want your team to act impulsively, jumping from one major move to the next without much connecting the logic and maybe mostly just to make sure ESPN keeps talking about you, well, that is just not going to be the way Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch ever do it.

You can criticize Shanahan and Lynch for some parts of their tenures here, for sure. They haven’t won a Super Bowl. When they have down years, they are really down. And yes, they didn’t make a trade on deadline day earlier this week. How unexciting!

You can also say that Jed York has maybe squeezed the spending this season in a way that Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones wouldn’t.

The Cowboys do ridiculous things, like trading two premium picks for Quinnen Williams on Tuesday just a few months after trading away a younger, better player in Micah Parsons for two premium picks. What’s the plan here? Other than to make sure ESPN and FS1 are filled with Cowboys content?

The 49ers, like it or not, have a much more subdued plan, at least for now. They’ve been telling us clearly and repeatedly since the summer that they're resetting themselves for a new three-year competitive cycle starting this season. And everything they’ve done (or not done) has reflected that.

Folks, this is what Year 1 of a financial and personnel reset looks like. It’s not supposed to be exciting on trade-deadline day. It might not work, but this is what it is.

What do you think they were doing when they discarded Deebo Samuel, Dre Greenlaw, Talanoa Hufanga, Aaron Banks, Jordan Mason, Leonard Floyd, Jaylon Moore, and others last spring?

They sure weren’t signaling that they were all-in for 2025.

You can believe in young players all you want, but if you go down this road, you have to understand that 1) the young draftees might not work out or be ready right away 2) they might get hurt 3) everybody else might get hurt.

I don’t think the 49ers “punted” the season by not making a move; I don’t think Lynch and Shanahan would ever totally throw away a season.

But if the 49ers ever sort of punted on 2025, it happened in March, not this week.

Now of course the 49ers’ pieced-together group after the season-ending losses of Nick Bosa and Fred Warner and so many other temporary losses has still managed to get to 6-3 and is on track for a playoff spot. Which is absolutely worth something.

And you never know if this is the last prime season for Trent Williams, Christian McCaffrey, Kyle Juszczyk, and a few others. You don’t want to waste that. You don’t want to devalue a football season. You want to be as good as you can every day and every year. That’s what I wrote about at the time of the offseason purge.

But after losing their two defensive Hall of Famers, what’s the cost-benefit formula of giving up a first-, second-, or third-round pick for a pass rusher who may or may not fix everything or remain healthy doing it? And if you’re not giving up a prime pick, what are you really getting, anyway?

The 49ers are going to need new offensive and defensive linemen in the very near future. They probably will need one or two more playmaking wide receivers, presuming Jauan Jennings’ pending free agency will lead him elsewhere. And by the way, that’s counting Ricky Pearsall (still out) and Brandon Aiyuk (out for more than a calendar year) as positives on the depth chart.

So Shanahan, Lynch, and York kept buttoned up this week. They’ve pushed in their chips in recent years — they’re the guys who, after all, traded for Williams, McCaffrey, Emmanuel Sanders, Chase Young, and Jimmy Garoppolo, among others.

But this is Year 1 of this cycle, not Year 3. Shanahan said it himself last month, when (not long after Bosa’s injury) I asked if the 49ers were at all in a similar place as they were in 2019 before they made the big deal for Sanders. His answer: No.

Since then, the 49ers have lost Warner and are still waiting for Purdy, Pearsall, and Aiyuk to come back.

And Shanahan kept saying in the days leading up to the deadline and since: Nothing has changed. They made their plan. You can argue that it’s too conservative and that they should’ve thrown it out the window and offered a first-round pick for Trey Hendrickson or a second-rounder to outbid the Eagles for Jaelen Phillips.

But instant gratification wasn’t the plan. And once you change your plan for instant gratification, you usually regret it. And delay the implementation of the next plan.

In August, the 49ers traded a sixth-round pick for Brian Robinson Jr. because they were counting on Isaac Guerendo and rookie Jordan James to be the backups behind McCaffrey (and had let Mason go) then decided at the last minute that they couldn’t actually count on them.

In the spring, they made that trade for Huff, which froze their fourth- and fifth-round picks (it’s a fourth-rounder if he gets eight or sacks, a fifth-rounder otherwise).

Last week, they traded a sixth-round pick to New England for Keion White and a seventh-rounder. (Would it have felt more satisfying to fans if the 49ers just delayed that trade a week and made it at the buzzer on Tuesday? Maybe. But it’s the same result, actually with the 49ers getting an extra game from White by doing it a week earlier.)

End result: The 49ers were dialed out of the non-headline trade market on Tuesday because usually those trades are made with fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-rounders.

Also, even though they’re projected to get three fourth-round compensatory picks due to their free-agent losses last spring, those picks can’t be traded until they’re officially awarded before the draft.

OK, why would the 49ers be so stuck on holding onto their third-round pick when they’ve been notoriously awful at drafting in that round?

A team can’t think like that. Personnel executives have to believe they can draft a starter in the third round, that they can do better than, among others, Jake Moody, Cam Latu, Ty Davis-Price, Danny Gray, Trey Sermon, etc., etc., I’ll stop here or else risk getting several phone calls from 49ers HQ.

The 49ers’ execs have to focus on hitting on a pick like Ji’Ayir Brown in the 2023 third round, for instance. Or Dominck Puni in the same round a year later.

Or the 49ers theoretically could use the pick to, say, move up two slots in the first round when you’ve targeted a slam-dunk tackle. Picks are valuable for what you might do with them. Not for how you’ve messed them up in the past.

(Note: The 49ers will probably get a good pick or two back if and when they trade Mac Jones next offseason, but it would’ve been difficult for the 49ers to factor that into any trade calculations this week.

(The Jets, Saints, Browns, Dolphins, and others could or will be looking for a starting quarterback. Jones is signed for next season, which is odd for a young former starter coming in as a backup, but I presume that we’ll find out that the 49ers tacitly agreed to trade Jones if things went well this season.

(Maybe the 49ers could’ve traded some of their picks now ahead of next offseason, knowing they’d be reloading with a potential Jones trade, but it’s hard to do when you don’t know what you’ll actually be getting.)

In a recurring theme over the years, the 49ers were blatantly over-optimistic about the potential recovery time after summer injuries to Jordan James, Jordan Watkins, Yetur Gross-Matos, and then more recently Pearsall and Purdy (who both could’ve been on and off the injured reserve list by now and are still potentially or likely to miss another game Sunday).

Keeping all those guys on the active roster sopped up spots, which meant that the 49ers lost Trevis Gipson to the Panthers when they couldn’t elevate him permanently from the practice squad.

That’s a pretty minor player. But Gipson played solidly when he was elevated for a few games by the 49ers this year. He added depth. He didn’t get hurt. Now he’s gone and the 49ers are still scrambling for anybody to play the position.

Also: Floyd, who, as is normal for him, has played every game for the Falcons so far this season, would look pretty good on the roster right now, wouldn’t he?

It should be relatively soon. I don’t think Lynch and Shanahan would have it any other way. And York has reliably spent a lot of cash in the past — the Javon Hargrave signing just a few years ago is frequently pointed out to me (and that it didn’t work is also pointed out).

I don’t expect York to be reckless about it. But I sure don’t expect him to spend another offseason letting so many veterans go and bringing in so few. You should only need to take your medicine once in a cycle.

Could the 49ers go after Hendrickson when he hits free agency this spring? Maybe not, but it shouldn’t be out of the question. Or a trade for Maxx Crosby? Trading some prime picks and picking up Laremy Tunsil’s huge contract in Washington if Adam Peters needs to do his own reset?

I’m not predicting that any of these will happen, only that we’re seeing what Year 1 of the 49ers’ reset looks like. Year 2 should be different. Or else why go through Year 1?