Davante Adams

Las Vegas Raiders wide receiver Davante Adams has missed the last two days of practice with the flu, per NFL Network's Tom Pelissero.

However, there's "optimism" he will be available for Sunday's game against the New Orleans Saints.

Adams has appeared in all six of Las Vegas' games to begin the season, emerging as Derek Carr's top target with 37 catches for 509 yards and five touchdowns.

However, the Raiders have struggled in Adams' first season with the franchise. They enter Week 8 with a 2-4 record under first-year head coach Josh McDaniels and are third in the AFC West behind the 5-2 Kansas City Chiefs and 4-3 Los Angeles Chargers.

Adams has been durable through his nine-year NFL career. In his eight seasons with the Green Bay Packers, he missed a total of 13 games. He caught 669 passes for 8,121 yards and 73 touchdowns in 116 games in that span, earning five Pro Bowl selections and two All-Pro selections.

If the 29-year-old misses Sunday's game against the Saints, Carr will have to rely more heavily on Hunter Renfrow, Mack Hollins, Keelan Cole and DJ Turner out wide. Hollins leads the group with 19 catches for 317 yards and two touchdowns.

Tight end Darren Waller also figures to be targeted more by Carr. He has caught 16 passes for 175 yards and one touchdown this year.

The Raiders desperately need to turn things around to make the playoffs, and Adams will be a key to that potential success. His health will be of the utmost importance.

Most wide receivers would be thrilled with a four-game start to the season that included three touchdown catches and two games of more than 100 receiving yards.

Most wide receivers aren't Davante Adams.

"There's been some good things to build on, but I think I have even higher standards than what's been put out there," the Las Vegas Raiders star told Bleacher Report. "Especially the two games in between. That's never how we want to come out of games, regardless of how the team is doing."

Standards don't get much higher than the ones Adams established as arguably the top wide receiver in the league during his first eight seasons with the Green Bay Packers as a five-time Pro Bowler and two-time All-Pro who went over 1,300 receiving yards in three of the last four years and led the league with 18 touchdown catches in 2020.

Yet his start with the Raiders was somewhat up-and-down with touchdowns in each of his first three games but just two catches for 12 yards in an overtime loss to the Arizona Cardinals in Week 2 and five catches for 36 yards in the Week 3 loss to the Tennessee Titans.

Adams bounced back in a major way Sunday with nine catches for 101 yards in the win over the Denver Broncos, marking his second time over the century mark after posting 141 yards in Week 1 against the Los Angeles Chargers.

"I think that was a big thing that we did a better job of this week was finding a way to allow me to have an impact on the game," he said. "Yeah, they are doing certain things with double-teams, triples, and doing a lot of stuff to take me away, but it's not the first time I've been exposed to that type of coverage. We're not going to let that dictate whether or not I'm able to make an impact on the game. That's what you saw this past Sunday. We had a better way to attack some of the stuff that they were doing and capitalized on those opportunities."

Finding a way to beat those double- and triple-teams will be key if the Raiders are going to live up to the elevated expectations that were put in place as soon as they traded for the game-changing wide receiver.

After all, they made the playoffs last season at 10-7 and lost a heartbreaker by seven points to the eventual AFC-champion Cincinnati Bengals. They figured to only improve with the addition of Adams, which made the 0-3 start to the 2022 campaign that much more surprising.

Yet the losses to the Chargers, Cardinals and Titans were all by one score and came by a combined 13 points, with the Arizona one happening in overtime after Las Vegas lost a 20-point lead.

It's not a stretch to suggest the team could be in much better position if a handful of plays unfolded differently, and Adams had a glass-half-full approach to the difficult start.

"Each game has given us confidence," he said. "They've all been one-score games. To be competitive at the end of these games and have them literally come down to the last play or a last sequence, that says a lot because we haven't played anything close to our standard of ball. Against three solid opponents, we had opportunities. The Arizona game we put ourselves in a great position in the first half being up 20-0, but that taught us a lesson and will ultimately contribute to us establishing our identity and knowing how to close out games and play a full 60 minutes."

The Raiders closed out Sunday's 32-23 victory over the Broncos and never trailed after a Josh Jacobs touchdown run early in the second quarter.

"We have achieved our standard," Adams said when asked what his immediate reaction was when the clock hit zero on the team's first win.

"Everything is still out in front of us even though it wasn't the most ideal start, especially given the type of team we have," he continued while looking ahead to a showdown with the Kansas City Chiefs. "When we got our win, it was definitely a little bit of a monkey off our back. But now we have to turn back around because we've got another great team to go out there and try to get a win against on the road. It's never going to be easy, but it's definitely good to check that one off so we can start rattling them off. That's the goal."

The goal of reaching the Super Bowl is still very much on the table, and some fans who are brave enough to wash their lucky jerseys could be joining him at the sport's biggest stage.

That's because Adams partnered with Tide in an effort to fight back against the idea that fans shouldn't wash their lucky jerseys. Fans who wash their jerseys with Tide Hygienic Clean pods will have the opportunity to win memorabilia or even Super Bowl tickets.

"This was a great opportunity to partner with Tide to give away signed jerseys, cleats and Super Bowl tickets in exchange for fans washing their lucky jerseys," Adams said. "We do acknowledge that it's not something that's easy to do, but using Tide hygienic pods is one of the easiest ways to be able to do this and feel good about it. All your superstitions and everything that's linked to that jersey will be intact, you'll just come out with a clean jersey. From personal experience, I can validate that."

While he believes in washing lucky jerseys, the five-time Pro Bowler does have some superstitions such as wearing the same style of socks under his Jordan cleats and making sure he's wearing his visor and wristband on game days.

He said the visor is darker in Las Vegas than it was in Green Bay to deal with the sun, but one thing that wasn't a major transition in the move was reconnecting with quarterback Derek Carr.

All Adams did in 2012 and 2013 while catching passes from Carr at Fresno State was post a combined 233 catches for 3,031 yards and 38 touchdowns, so chemistry didn't figure to be an issue when the college teammates reunited at the NFL level.

There have been some ups and downs, though, as Carr, who is a three-time Pro Bowler who threw for more than 4,000 yards in each of the last four seasons, attempts to navigate getting the ball to the best player while also understanding he can't force feed it into the constant double coverage Adams faces.

"With the coverage part, we still have to make strides with that and get used to playing with each other when they do things to prevent me from having an impact on the game," Adams said. "But it's been like riding a bike as far as our connection and especially our friendship and getting together and being able to make that feel like old times. I've definitely enjoyed being back on the field with Derek."

They will be on the field together in the latest edition of one of the league's fiercest rivalries when the Raiders face the Chiefs on Monday with an opportunity to make up some ground in the AFC West.

Playing in the hostile environment that is Kansas City won't make the job any easier, but Adams isn't focused on the rivalry aspect of the upcoming contest.

"That's more of the fans' thing," he said. "As far as the players, if you have the right mentality, then every single game should feel like a rivalry game. And that's how I approach it, I don't take any opponent lighter than any other. Obviously they have a really good team and there's history there, but for me personally, and I know some of my teammates as well, we're just focused on going out to improve our record."

Improving their record in Kansas City on a national stage would be an ideal way for the Raiders to announce to the rest of the NFL that they put their slow start behind them and are ready to challenge for a Lombardi Trophy with one of the league's top playmakers leading the way.

The money may have been longer in Las Vegas than Green Bay, but Davante Adams is learning the grass isn't greener.

The Raiders wideout said he is "frustrated and angry" amid the team's 0-3 start.

"Frustrated and angry. Expect more," Adams told reporters after Sunday's 24-22 loss to the Tennessee Titans. "It's not easy to win in this league. We know that. Nobody's naive to the fact that nobody’s just going to lay down and just give you a victory, but at the end of the day we expect more and we will do better as we move forward."

Adams finished with five catches for 36 yards and a touchdown, his second straight disappointing outing after starting the season with a 10-catch, 141-yard game against the Los Angeles Chargers. He's compiled just 48 total receiving yards over the last two weeks, which likely compounds the sense of frustration.

The Raiders are one of just two remaining winless teams three weeks into the NFL season. The other is the Houston Texans, a team almost no one thought had a chance of competing for a postseason berth. Las Vegas was a wild-card team a year ago and came into 2022 with massive expectations after trading for Adams and hiring Josh McDaniels as head coach.

All parties have failed to live up to the hype three weeks into the season. Adams looks like he sorely misses Aaron Rodgers, who has the Packers out to a 2-1 start, while McDaniels' second chance at being a head coach is looking an awful lot like the first.

Adams says he wants his new team to "stay the course," but they're quickly falling behind in a competitive AFC West.