The Giants come into the 2023 NFL Draft with 10 draft picks and a team roster that was the 11th-youngest in the league last year. That puts them in a unique position of being able to build for the future, while also having the ammunition to consolidate picks and trade up in the draft for impact players.
That’s a far cry from where they were just a year ago.
“Last year, just where we were financially, we needed as many depth pieces as we can,” said Giants general manager Joe Schoen last week.
That resulted in the Giants trading back twice in the second round of the 2022 NFL Draft so that they could build a roster around salary cap restrictions and begin to overturn a roster that they inherited from the previous regime.
“Moving back a couple times last year just made sense,” Schoen explained. “It got us some more bodies, so that was a little bit of the thought process that went into that.”
However, with the Giants now operating with more salary cap freedom and a roster that is more reflective of Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll’s vision, adding 10 more rookies might not make the most sense. Those 10 picks would make up 18.9% of the Giants’ 53-man roster, which seems unrealistic for a team that is trying to win the NFC East and make a return trip to the playoffs.
The more realistic scenario is the Giants trying to package some of those 10 draft picks to move up in the draft. It’s a scenario that Schoen has been upfront about as well.
“I mean, right now we have ten [picks],” he said last week. “If there’s somebody we want to move up for, we have some extra draft capital to do that.”
While there is some speculation the Giants could be willing to move up in the first round, it sounds like Schoen remains confident the team will have a player they like fall to them at pick 25.
“We have guys in the first round that we like, and we are pretty confident that there will be somebody there when we pick at 25 that we’ll be happy with.”
As a result, the more likely spot for the Giants to trade up and acquire a cost-effective starter would be to trade up from their spot in the second round, which is currently pick 57.
If you look at the NFL Trade Value chart, you can see that the Giants’ second-round pick has a value of 330 points. If they were to combine that with their fourth-round pick and the lesser of their two fifth-round picks, they would be at 395, which would get them to move up seven spots to pick 50 in the second round. If they traded their second, third, and lesser of their firth round picks, they could move into the top-five picks of the second round.
That gives the Giants flexibility to be as aggressive as they want to be on day two in order to get a player they may have had a first-round grade on who just happened to fall. The Giants could also use picks from the 2024 draft in order to move up as well.
“If it’s the right player and the value aligns, I’d move up,” Schoen said. “If it was a future pick, I would do that, too.”
However, if the Giants don’t feel that the draft falls in a way that compels them to move up, there’s another scenario in which the team trades mid or late-round picks for better picks in next year’s draft.
“If we want to move back and collect some [picks], we can do that, too,” explained Schoen. “Again, you have to look at the roster, not just today but 2024, 2025, who is coming up. Again, financially there are players making a pretty good chunk of money on our team and some contracts on the horizon potentially. So yeah, those young cost-controlled players for four years that can be contributors, whether that’s a role on offense or defense, four core special teams guys. I think it’s important to continue to build depth and competition, and that’s what we’ll try to do with those picks.”
Whichever way it shakes out, it appears that the Giants could be one of the more active teams during this week’s NFL Draft.
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