New York Giants: Thoughts After Day 1 of Pre-Free Agency Period

On the surface, the Giants had a quiet start to free agency. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? Let's explore the answer.

The Giants, who are well aware of their personnel flaws, had a relatively quiet first day of the pre-free agency period, landing two depth players (running back Devontae Booker and defensive tackle Austin Johnson).

Along the way, the Giants, as was always (unfortunately) expected, lost their homegrown defensive tackle Dalvin Tomlinson to the Minnesota Vikings, a team that seems to have a penchant for Giants defensive tackles.

On the surface, the Giants lost Tomlinson thanks to not having space (which you could point to the unsettled contract dealings with franchise tag player Leonard Williams and offensive tackle Nate Solder as reasons). And the Giants, who said getting Daniel Jones a playmaker or two is a priority, still haven't done that as of yet.

So all of that said makes the Giants losers after the first day, right?

Ever since getting burned in 2018 with hefty contracts paid out of desperation to players that were past their prime (Nate Solder), the Giants took a different approach last year to where they invested in younger options just coming off rookie deals and with relatively clean injury histories.

That practice paid off handsomely for New York, who ended up with Blake Martinez and James Bradberry, two players who, by the way, general manager Dave Gettleman should make an exception for regarding restructuring and extending if he needs some immediate cap space while negotiations drag on with Leonard Williams and Solder.

Okay, so what about the rest of their approach? I can only take an educated guess regarding what the team might be thinking, but perhaps why they haven’t splurged on a wide receiver as of yet (besides not having the money to do so at the moment) is because they don’t want history to repeat itself.

When it comes to landing a wide receiver, there are a couple of schools of thought at play.

The first is that Detroit’s Kenny Golladay is a receiver who should be pursued at all costs. Back up the Brinks truck and pay the man because he’s that special of a receiver.

But that kind of thinking is what got the Giants into the current state they’re in. Remember when they didn’t have a left tackle after Ereck Flowers didn’t pan out?

The Giants, desperate to add to their offensive line, went and overspent on Nate Solder, a decent player, but one whose production was realistically never going to match the then record-setting money he received.

And by the way, to this day, the Giants are still paying for that move. They’ve been in negotiations with Solder to lower his cap number from the $16.5 million chokehold it currently has on their cap, something that I’m stunned the two sides didn’t finish before the start of the pre-free agency period.

So with a draft class filled with talented receivers expected to be available in every round, is it possible that the Giants have resisted the urge to spend like an out-of-control shopper during a pre-holiday sale and are using that as leverage in negotiations?

That wouldn’t be surprising, especially after seeing how slow the Day 1 market was for the top receivers. The prudent teams (and those who have been burned before by their desperation) don’t simply go all out on a player just because he is a “name.”

Now to the other side of the coin: defensive tackle Dalvin Tomlinson. It’s thought that run-stuffing defensive tackles are plentiful in every draft.

After they declined a trade offer with Green Bay, you would have thought that locking Tomlinson up for the long-term might have been a higher priority. Maybe it was, and the player wanted to test the market—it does take two sides to make a contract after all.

But it’s worth asking ourselves if the reason why Tomlinson is an ex-Giant. Is it because he had no interest in returning despite publicly saying so to the contrary, or because the Giants' didn’t try hard enough to make it happen given their apparent prioritization on getting Williams and Solder’s contracts in line?

If it’s the former, then shame on the Giants for letting another homegrown product worthy of a second contract walk out the door.