NY Giants, Leonard Williams saga comes to an end for now

The NY Giants have been in a sticky situation with Leonard Williams since the moment they traded for him, and they failed to negotiate a contract with him before the start of free agency.

As I’ve been saying, if the NY Giants don’t sign Leonard Williams to a contract extension before free agency, this trade becomes even more of an abject failure than it already has been. From the beginning, it was clear to anyone with a brain that giving up draft picks for an impending free agent ceded all the power to said free agent, and they’d have to be crazy not to extract every dollar possible.

It looks like Leonard Williams’ agent got that memo, as the two sides were unable to reach an agreement and he was slapped with the franchise tag on Monday morning. It was an unfortunate ending (for now) to this whole saga, as he’ll now be playing for an incredibly bloated $16M salary for the NY Giants in 2020.

As these ‘negotiations’ were going on no one really thought the franchise tag could ever really be in play. I, for one, had speculated that the transition tag might be the most prudent way to deal with this situation, as it allowed Big Blue to see what the actual market was for Williams with a chance to match, with the other option being him playing for $12M – much closer to his value – in 2020.

Spotrac lists his value at $8.2M, which is totally fair – and honestly maybe still a little high – based on his lack of production. However, due to his potential and age, he was very likely to do much better than that on the open market, say in the $10-$12M range. But $16M? That’s top-five money and is going to take a large chunk out of Big Blue’s spending money.

So in the end, Dave Gettleman is doing what is best for himself here rather than what’s best for the organization, which has always been my worry with him heading into a must-win season. Even the biggest Leonard Williams fan couldn’t possibly argue that he’s worth $16M, or anything close to it, really.

Instead, Gettleman used the one tool he had to guarantee Williams would stay on the roster and thus to avoid an all-time level of scrutiny he would endure for giving up draft compensation only to let a player walk. You can’t imagine that new head coach Joe Judge is very happy about giving a slightly above average player top-five money when he wasn’t involved in giving up that draft compensation.

We’ll see how it goes from here, as the team still has time to work out a long-term deal with Williams that could lower his cap hit. However, since he’s already guaranteed at least $16M (based off the defensive tackle franchise number that we’re all praying it is), he’d be nuts to entertain any kind of deal in the $10M range that he’s actually worth.

As we said from the beginning here, this was never going to work out in the team’s favor, and Gettleman should have just waited until he was a free agent to go after him without giving up any draft picks.