New York Giants Trade Kadarius Toney, Believe In Sunk Costs

Back on 2021 NFL Draft night, then-Giants head coach Joe Judge was entirely comfortable vouching for Kadarius Toney, the consolation prize for the Giants after Philadelphia jumped ahead of New York and took DeVonta Smith at tenth overall, leading the Giants to trade down to 20th and select Toney.

“You know, the skill and the person has to add up together,” Judge told the media that night. “We fully vetted every player on this board. We are very comfortable bringing him to New Jersey. We are very comfortable adding him to our roster to compete with other players on the team. Listen, we use every resource we have, okay, Jeremy Pruitt who is in our building, Jeremy recruited him out of high school. So we have people in this building with established relationships who have known this guy through the course of not only being in college, but going back to when they were in high school developing as a player.We have numerous coaches that spent a long time recruiting, have had this guy in summer camps for multiple days at a time and had extended exposure to him. We had guys at the pro day. We had Zoom meetings that were allotted by the league; we used those, phone calls. We have a great medical staff and we trust them to decisions for by the medical. I’m not a doctor, so I trust Ronnie Barnes and his staff. In terms of anything else off the field, again, look, it’s no secret I’m pretty particular about who I bring into this building, okay. I think sometimes you have to understand the person, and you have to understand the character on a deeper level than what just may be Tweeted out.”

As ever, the Joe Judge/Dave Gettleman Era produced some obvious questions, which, when asked, were dismissed in condescending tones, followed almost immediately by evidence that the Giants did not, in fact, know better.

Such was the case with Toney, who the Giants traded to the Kansas City Chiefs on Thursday for a conditional third-round pick and a sixth rounder in 2023. As my colleague Jeff Fedotin notes, he won’t cost the Chiefs much. That the cap-strapped Giants dealt him despite his low cost speaks volumes about what they thought of Toney, too.

Toney was not healthy — his missed 12 of a 24 possible games. He was not a strong presence on the team, either, if his tweets (and more significantly, the eagerness a thin-at-receiver Giants regime showed in dealing him) are any indication.

But truly, trading a first-round pick for so little, so soon says everything about what this regime thinks of its predecessor. Another way of looking at it is this: the Joe Schoen/Brian Daboll Giants think they can get more value out of a possible third round pick and a sixth rounder than Gettleman got out of the 20th overall pick in the 2021 draft.

It’s hard to argue. That trading down produced an extra pick in 2022, but it was Schoen making it, not Gettleman. And Evan Neal, the selection, has already given indications that he’s going to be a critical part of a Giants’ offensive line that’s been among the best groups in the NFL so far this season.

It probably helped that unlike the Gettleman regime, Schoen didn’t so publicly telegraph his preferences that division rivals could come along and steal them out from under the Giants. (Imagine, for a moment, this Daboll offense with Smith in the lineup.)

What does this mean for other Giants from the previous era? Well, Kenny Golladay is under no illusions.

The trade deadline is next Tuesday, Nov. 1. Don’t expect that the Giants are finished. They’re evaluating players on a deeper level than tweets.