Giants Can't Forget About This Key Position on the Offense

The Giants' wide receiver position could become a sneaky need as free agency nears, and there is one area in the aerial offense that the team lacks.

New York Giants wide receiver Darius Slayton is a pending unrestricted free agent expected to test the market this year. | Steven Bisig-Imagn Images

As the New York Giants continue their quest for a quarterback, they also can’t ignore some of the other glaring and less glaring needs on the roster.

One of the less glaring needs that has been flying under the radar, though, is wide receiver. The Giants are likely to lose veteran Darius Slayton once the free agency negotiating window opens next week.

Slayton, one of the longest-tenured players on the Giants’ roster, is set to test the open waters after failing to reach a new contract last offseason when he was first seeking an extension from the team. 

The Giants only added incentives to his deal, none of which he earned in a rare dismal year in which he tallied 39 catches for 573 yards and two touchdowns. 

However, Slayton has been one of the most reliable targets for the Giants’ aerial offense in his six-year tenure, finishing as the team’s leading receiver four times with 700+ yard seasons and an average haul above 15.0 yards. 

All of that was with Daniel Jones as his quarterback, and the story of the position’s inconsistency had already been hashed out. 

Now, the veteran could court interest from several other franchises in free agency who could use his services as a No. 2 caliber receiver on more elite offenses than what the Giants have boasted. Some of those teams could also offer him more money, with Spotrac projecting an annual value of $15.8 million on a three-year deal that the Giants may not devote in return.

Darius Slayton has been an underrated part of the New York Giants offense since he was drafted in the fifth round in 2019. | Julian Leshay Guadalupe/NorthJersey.com / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

If Slayton departs from New York this offseason, it will leave a noticeable hole that the Giants couldn’t really make the most of with him present. That would be the X receiver role, which Pro Football Network believes is the biggest non-quarterback question that needs to be addressed on offense.  

The need for a solid X-receiver to pair with Malik Nabers and Wan’Dale Robinson is obvious. Last season, the Giants quarterbacks had the fifth-shortest aDOT (average distance of target) at 6.8 air yards. 

Adding another deep threat would enable the Giants, who, per PFN, only saw 9.3% of their pass completions gain 20+ yards last season (the second-lowest in the league, behind Miami), to really stretch the field.

The fact that the Giants had such low success at being a deep-threat team shouldn’t be much of a surprise to many. As head coach Brian Daboll publicly admitted at the end of the season, it’s hard to find consistency and power in an offensive attack when a team has poor or shifting quarterback play. 

At the beginning of the season, it felt like the Giants were seeking to make Nabers that coveted vertical option, given his niftiness and big-time playmaking abilities with his hands. That did work for the most part, as the rookie sensation led the most active pass catchers not named Slayton with a 9.7 aDOT and the most 20+ air yard targets.

Eventually as injuries started to take hold on the offense’s ability to gel from game to game, the efficiency in the deep field rescinded as confidence and timing to go deep slumped. Again, while part of that was poor play under center, there were times when the wide receivers missed some significant opportunities on the back end. 

It’s why the Giants might be interested in long-ball gunslingers such as draft prospects Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders as their future signal callers. The Giants can ill-afford not to ensure that an incoming rookie has all he needs to be successful, a mistake the team made with Daniel Jones. 

With the Giants’ heavier draft focus on a few other positions, they might not address the wideout gap until Day 3. In the past, Schoen has spoken about the cost of getting a high-end veteran free agent being an unwise investment and has mainly taken to the draft to fill the receiver role.    

Regardless of how the Giants approach it, if they want to catch up with the rest of their division, this sneaky need shouldn’t be ignored as the roster-building process begins in earnest next week.

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