Danielle Hunter is the best player on the Minnesota Vikings defense, a unit that has shown dramatic improvement this year. He is leading the league in sacks with 10.0, and that unit will be expected to do even more with quarterback Kirk Cousins out for the rest of the season after suffering an Achilles injury in the team's Week 8 victory over the Green Bay Packers.

That win came days before the NFL's trade deadline, and there were thoughts throughout the first half of the season that the Vikings would be sellers after starting the season with 3 consecutive losses. While the Vikings have won 4 of 5 games since then, the Cousins injury raised the prospect that the Vikings might be sellers and Hunter could be one of the players that general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah would move.

Instead, the Vikings turned out to be buyers as they traded for quarterback Josh Dobbs to step in at quarterback. Hunter, the NFC's defensive player of the month of October, had no desire to be traded.

“I've had people talk to me about that,” Hunter said Thursday, “but it was never really in the back of my head. I was always going to be here.”

“I just wanted to be here,” Hunter said. “There's always some stuff going on with that, and you don't ask me, you ask the GM. My job is to play football, and that's why I'm here. I've always loved doing what I'm doing, so I don't pay attention to outside noise.”

With Cousins out, the Vikings' 11th-ranked defense will have to step up even further if the team is going to remain in playoff contention.