Where NY Giants cap space stands after Rhett Ellison retirement

The NY Giants were already flush with cash before Rhett Ellison’s retirement. Now, the team has even more to head into free agency with.

Rhett Ellison’s sudden retirement from the NY Giants made a potentially tough decision for GM Dave Gettleman all that much easier. Ellison had clearly taken a physical beating over the course of his eight-year NFL career playing in the trenches and felt it was time to hang it up, possibly avoided being cut, anyway.

Before Ellison retired on Monday heading into the last year of his contract, Big Blue was already positioned well with about $71M in total cap space a week out from free agency. After clearing $5M off the books with Ellison, the team now boasts a robust $76M in space and is looking to make some noise in the free agency market.

The number puts them just outside the top five in the NFL cap space rankings, although the Cowboys – the team directly ahead of them – won’t have nearly that much to spend after retaining a couple of important in-house players — namely Dak Prescott and Amari Cooper, who will eat up a majority of that cap space by themselves.

You can lump the Buccaneers – and even the Bills and Colts to an extent – in with the Cowboys as teams that have a lot of cash on the face of things but will end up with much more after bringing back many of their own players. The Giants aren’t really in that position, with Leonard Williams and possibly Markus Golden being the only two potential big-money free agents the team could consider bringing back.

The NY Giants could also add even more cash to their arsenal by moving on from players such as Antoine Bethea ($2.7M) and Spencer Pulley ($2.75M), although it seems like Gettleman is taking his time with these two as he must consider them possible useful assets for 2020. It’s hard to understand how he could think that about Bethea, but in theory, there’s no reason to make an early move as that’s basically money in the bank, and I guess you never know how the free agency period is going to play out.

Big Blue has been linked to many of the premier players on the market — Jadeveon Clowney, Byron Jones, and James Bradberry, just to name a few. This extra money will go a long way towards the NY Giants having a shot at any of these players, with agents and players considering every last penny when comparing where they’d like to continue their careers.