The New York Giants are shaking things up at wide receiver this season. The team added both a new deep threat in Kenny Golladay and a promising draft pick in Kadarius Toney, and it’s certain that their on the field lineup at the position will look different compared to recent years.
For some of the existing players at receiver, that might be unsettling. After all, the newcomers are direct competition for the top performers from the last couple of seasons. However, head coach Joe Judge claims that the Giants aren’t planning to replace their current lineup of playmakers. At least, not yet.
Speaking to reporters after minicamp, Judge talked about the Giants drafting Kadarius Toney as well as how it will impact existing receiver Darius Slayton.
“I would say he’s a veteran player,” Judge said of Slayton. “He’s not in his first year, he’s got skin in the game right there. In terms of Darius, everyone is going to play to their strengths. Darius and Toney, will they be on the field at the same time, different packages, different positions at times, but I think everybody on the team affects the other by the way they work and how they produce.”
As Slayton and Toney are both coming into the season behind Golladay and likely Sterling Shepard on the depth chart, it looks like they’ll be in some kind of competition despite the insistence that they have different roles.
Judge also spoke about talking to Sterling Shepard, another player threatened by the addition of Toney. According to Judge, despite the headlines, the Giants also didn’t make the pick to replace Shepard.
“I thought it was necessary to talk to Shep specifically because when we drafted Toney the word in the press as he was reading those headlines was specifically he’s a slot receiver which, look, we are not bringing in someone to play one position. I thought it was relevant at the time to contact Shep out of respect for how he is with our program to communicate that with him,” Judge continued.
Clearing up misunderstandings like this is something that Judge claims to have done regularly – he also talked on the phone with Nate Solder after the Giants drafted Andrew Thomas. Though, the writing was still on the wall going forward and Thomas ended up taking over the starting role anyway as Solder opted out of the season.
At the end of the day, getting better isn’t an easy process for a team. For better players to come in, some players have to get displaced. That’s just the nature of the sport, and we have yet to see how that process is going to turn out for the Giants. It is, after all, inevitable for some players to lose their spot even if the coaches have the best of intentions.