The NFL trade deadline came and went yesterday, and the New York Giants didn’t make any moves, choosing to leave their recent transactions at just the earlier crosstown trade for Leonard Williams. The team couldn’t find deals for Janoris Jenkins, Nate Solder, or Alec Ogletree despite all three players having been, according to Ian Rapoport, potentially on the trading block.
That leaves the Giants in an awkward situation going into the second half of the season.
The fact of the matter is, it’s hard to sweep the trade rumors under the rug now that the deadline is past and act like they never happened in the first place. Jenkins has long been rumored to be on the trading block for the Giants and those rumors hit their peak intensity this week, with the deadline approaching.
The expectation was that Jenkins would end up traded. There were plenty of articles about potential destinations, rumors that the Giants could pull the trigger on a move, and that the Giants were actively shopping the player. To a lesser extent, one could also say that the same is true for a player like Alec Ogletree or Nate Solder, both of whom were named as being shopped by the team.
Now, the deadline is passed and no deals were made for any of the trio. But just like Eli Manning’s days as the starting quarterback were numbered once the team took Daniel Jones, despite their public commitments to Manning, their days with the Giants might still be numbered after the Giants made the decision to take these players out of their long term plans.
Sure, Jenkins and the others still have at least half a season left with the team, maybe more, but it’s hard to see them staying for too long around a team that attempted to shop them for a move – Jenkins has been in this position for a while now and it doesn’t seem that he remains in the team’s plans for the future, and it’s clear that the Nate Solder experiment hasn’t worked out if the Giants were open to moving their big name addition this early on in his career with the team.
The question for the rest of the season is whether or not the Giants will get the best performances out of this group of players after they’ve already shown that they aren’t committed to keeping them. It’s like a couple staying together when everyone assumed they would break up. Will they be able to put the past in the past and move forward from here? The answer isn’t clear.
Jenkins, Ogletree, and Solder are all players that could be considered part of the Giants’ core at the beginning of the season, but it looks like more rebuilding is in store after this season based on the way things went during the first half of this one.
The team will have to assemble the core that they’ve been looking for during the past couple of seasons in the near future, through a combination of drafting and trading, as it’s clear that as of now, they haven’t gotten far enough in their rebuild to say that they have a firm one.
Until then, however, they’re stuck in a strange spot – left to limp through the rest of the season with a two win record and a few veteran starters that they’ve all but made clear that they wouldn’t mind walking away from in a trade. Not the best situation. For either the Giants or the players involved.