Giants, fans have reason for optimism as free agency begins

What the Giants did last season — resurrecting hope in their fan base, winning nine games, prevailing on the road in the playoffs — seems almost heroic by recent standards.

That they locked up their most important offensive players, quarterback Daniel Jones (new $160 million deal) and Saquon Barkley ($10.1 million franchise tag, can continue to negotiate a contract until July 15), may not have felt seamless to those inside the negotiations but seemed mostly drama-free from the outside.

General manager Joe Schoen even confessed that had he known how Jones would perform in 2022, he would have picked up his fifth-year option. (How’s that for matter-of-fact honesty?)

Now, on the cusp of free agency, how does the Giants fan feel anything but confident — both in the next few weeks and in the long-term vision?

(There’s a reason that while speaking of Schoen and coach Brian Daboll at the recent NFL Scouting Combine, an AFC general manager told Newsday,  “Those guys know what they’re doing,”)

NFL free agency officially begins at 4 p.m. Wednesday, but teams are permitted to speak with free agents beginning Monday during what has been deemed  the legal tampering period. But no prospective unrestricted free agent is permitted to execute a contract with a new club until 4 p.m. on Wednesday.

The Giants will enter free agency with about $27 million in available cap space. They have plenty of needs, including wide receiver, cornerback, linebacker and defensive line depth. Some of those needs, of course, could be met in the draft.

Schoen has given clues this month, including at the NFL Combine, that seem to indicate some of the Giants’ strategy.

He has not seemed particularly hopeful about retaining safety Julian Love, who likely has played himself into a richer contract than what the Giants will pay.

“I think I saw a couple of safeties may be released,” Schoen said, “so we’ll see what that market looks like, and if there’s going to be a surplus or not, and where his value falls.”

On a couple of occasions, Schoen has said, “We love Julian.”

Conversely, when asked about securing younger help on the interior of the offensive line — and at the expense of veterans Jon Feliciano and Nick Gates — Schoen balked.

“It’s not just on the field with some of these guys,” he said. “Leadership in the locker room and within their position group [matters] and you’ve got to make sure you don’t let a lot of leadership walk out of the building. That’s gonna be a concerted effort for some of these guys — backups, starters, whatever it may be — we want to retain some of our leadership.”

At the NFL Combine, Schoen singled out Jihad Ward for his leadership, especially with Kayvon Thibodeaux and Azeez Ojulari. Schoen also mentioned, again, that the media did a good job of asking Leonard Williams if he would take a pay cut on the day the Giants cleaned out their lockers.

That situation hasn’t reached its conclusion.

“When he’s healthy, I still think Leo’s a good player in the league,” Schoen said. “Again, when you look in the draft and the last few years, the defensive tackles are just not producing as they have in the past. So it’s becoming harder and harder to find those guys. We want to be solid up front on both sides of the ball. Again, we know what the [cap] number is, [$12.4 million], but we still think he plays at a high level.”

It is no surprise that two players who proved their worth to the Giants when they were acquired later in the 2022 season, wide receiver Isaiah Hodgins and linebacker Jarrad Davis,  already have been rewarded with one-year contracts for 2023.

Schoen has a vision, as does Daboll. The ride for these Giants feels as if it’s just begun.

By Kimberly Jones

kimberly.jones@newsday.comkimjonessports

Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.