Apparently, Moss wanted out because he was miserable on the team. Moss took a lot of heat over the past couple of years for being kind of a malinger and lollygagger, but we sort of felt sympathetic to him-- he was a great player trapped on a totally shite team. You try caring when your offensive coordinator was last seen manning a bed & breakfast, the head coach was still stuck in the 90's, the QB was continuously on his back, and your WR compadre was suspended for an entire season for ranting about all of that. We wouldn't go throwing our body around to catch passes down the middle either. On the other hand, nobody asked us to.
Now the move is interesting for plenty of reasons, not the least of which is that the Raiders have themselves a shiny new QB playing (JaMarcus Russell). You would think that having Russell throwing to Moss during a season would be kind of a good thing, n'est pas? And if you were going to lose your #1 receiver like that, why not go for Calvin Johnson instead to replace him? It's not like there weren't any QBs to be had later in the draft. Or why draft a TE in the second round when you have seven TEs on your roster already? One TE does not equal a WR.
Finally, there's the issue of whom Moss was traded to. All decade, the Pats have been notorious for winning with a completely self-less, team-first automatons all under the whip of Bill Belichik and the Golden Boy. Now the team has traded for possible the anti-thesis of everything the franchise has stood for, a selfish me-first ego driven star. Considering a not very spectacular Pats team almost made it to the Superbowl and were probably a WR or two away from going, the fact they now have one of the best in the business has to be making a lot of GMs nervous. They've already signed Donte Stallworth, Wes Walker, and Kelley Washington too. In other words, the Pats are looking scary.