Giants can’t afford to waste Malik Nabers’ special talent

Here is what John Mara said the other day about his general manager, Joe Schoen, and his coach, Brian Daboll, and about the 2024-25 Giants:

“I have a lot of confidence in this particular team. The communication is great, and I think we’ve added some good pieces. Now, it’s time to show.”

Mara, one of the good guys, may have a lot of confidence in Schoen and Daboll as they enter the third season of their partnership at MetLife Stadium. An awful lot of Giants fans I know do not, not after everything that’s happened over the last year-and-a-half since that playoff win over the Vikings. Giants fans, even the ones who binged out on the “Joe Schoen Show” that was an essential part of “Hard Knocks,” also don’t care so much about the lines of communication between the GM and the coach, even if both of them are good guys, too.

Every Giants fan I know does care and mightily that the Giants have added what might turn out to be a spectacular piece to their team with Malik Nabers, who has a chance to be the most exciting player they’ve ever had, especially if gets some help at all this season from Daniel Jones.

But something on which everybody is in total agreement is the last part of that statement above from Mara, the most passionate Giants fan of them all:

It’s time for the Giants to show.

What they really need to show is that they are going to be something more than a last-place team; that they can at least finish ahead of Jayden Daniels, the Heisman Trophy winner, and the Commanders in the NFC East.

Understand something: In good times and bad times the Giants still matter around here as much as any professional team we have, and that means even in the wake of the rising we saw last spring from the Knicks. They matter right now, as much of a mystery as they are, even though there is no way of knowing whether they are going to start turning things around this season, or keep going the wrong way, which they very well might.

One thing we do know for sure about them? They absolutely have to give Nabers, their first-round draft choice, every possible chance to be the kind of game-changer they drafted him to be. Nabers is that talented. He is that much of a show when he has the ball in his hands. At the very least, he can win the Giants a couple of games all by himself in the upcoming season, maybe even make them something more than a 6-win or 7-win team.

Really, when one of the owners of the team, the one with a family name that has mattered around here in football for 100 years, talks about how it’s time for the Giants to show, what he’s really saying is this:

Time for them to show they aren’t going to stink this season, that they’re not going to be the dreary and unwatchable mess they were for so much of last season once Jones got hurt.

It may be silly for the Jets, who’ve gone the longest in the NFL without making it to the playoffs, who are coming off the single most disappointing season in their history because of the injury to Aaron Rodgers, to really be treating everything like it’s Super Bowl or bust for them. Because no one, starting with Rodgers, know what to expect from No. 8, not for the season in which he will turn 41, and not coming back from an Achilles injury, one as catastrophic as there is in his sport or anybody else’s.

Certainly no one knows if Robert Saleh, the coach, has the chops to finally coach a winning team, before that team ever thinks about being a real contender out of the toughest conference in the sport.

But if we’re talking about shows here today, the Jets have a better chance to be a good one this season than the Giants. The Jets, even if Rodgers is not what he was a few years ago in Green Bay, are going to have their shot at being better than the Bills or the Dolphins in the AFC East.

The Giants have the Eagles ahead of them in the NFC East. They have the Cowboys, even if the Cowboys are another team that could start going the wrong way this season. Then there are the Commanders, now coached by Dan Quinn, who once had his Falcons team ahead of the Patriots 28-3 in a Super Bowl game, about to beat Tom Brady and Bill Belichick and the Patriots in the big game the way the Giants did twice before the roof caved in on them in the second half, and then in overtime.

And the Commanders do have Daniels, one of the top three picks in the draft along with Caleb Williams and Drake Maye, the kid from North Carolina on which the Giants did more than just kick the tires in the run-up to the draft. We all know the reason for that:

In Year 6 of the Daniel Jones era, they still aren’t sure what they have in him. They also don’t know whether they’re going to have to start all over again at quarterback when this season is over.

Mara said he believes the Giants have a good foundation in place. We’re about to find out how much of a foundation. John says he wants to walk off the field at the end of the season, however the season ends, and honestly feel his team is moving in the right direction. And the Giants might very well might do that. Or not.

I want the Giants to do well, not just because I grew up at Giants fan in upstate New York. It’s because the sports year is so much better and more fun and more interesting in New York, meaning the whole idea of New York, when the Giants are really in play. I want Jones to look like the passing-running threat he was when the Giants did win that playoff game against the Vikings in January of ’23. I want Giants fans to have real hope again this season.

Mostly I want to watch Malik Nabers, because I think he’s that good, and has a world of potential; because I think he can change the way the Giants look on offense the way Lawrence Taylor once did that on defense. It wasn’t so terribly long ago that Mara was talking about how the Giants had done just about everything possible to screw up Jones. I don’t want the same thing to happen to the kid from LSU.