The Giants were mocked for acquiring Leonard Williams in a 2019 midseason trade with the Jets.
Williams was considered a good, solid, dependable player, but not dominant, not a player who lived up to being drafted sixth overall in 2015. He played four-plus seasons with the Jets and amassed a modest 17.5 sacks, 96 quarterback hits and 34 tackles for losses.
Williams also came to the Giants with an expiring contract. And make no mistake, the 2019 Giants, 2-6 at the time of the trade, were hardly making a run at the Super Bowl that year, finishing 4-12. So, Williams was hardly an acquisition to put them over the top.
As a result, then-embattled Giants general manager Dave Gettleman was ridiculed for giving up third-round pick and conditional fourth-rounder for a player who was likely to walk after the 2020 season.
A funny thing happened after all of that criticism the Giants endured for the move: Three years later, the evidence shows the Giants have won the trade … in a landslide.
The 29-year-old Williams, after a quiet first seven games with the Giants in ’19 after the trade (only a half-sack), played for the $16.1 million franchise tag in 2020 and produced a career-high 11.5 sacks, good enough to earn him a three-year, $63 million contract with $45 million guaranteed in 2021.
And today, he’s a cornerstone of what has potential to be one of the top defensive lines in the league.
The Jets used the 2020 third-round pick they got in the Williams trade to draft safety Ashtyn Davis, who’s never developed into anything more than a special teams player and a rotational backup on defense, and looks like he may be struggling to even make the roster this summer.
The conditional pick the Jets got from the trade was used to draft cornerback Michael Carter II with the 154th-overall pick in 2021. Carter has been a backup and occasional nickel back.
Williams?
He has potential to be even better than he was in 2020 playing alongside Dexter Lawrence on the inside and with outside pass-rush threats Kayvon Thibodeaux in his second NFL season and Azeez Ojulari healthy after an injury-riddled 2022.
“At first, I thought a lot of things were God-given to him,’’ veteran defensive lineman Rakeem Nunez-Roches said before the team’s evening practice on Tuesday. “But being here and seeing how he approaches the game, his work ethic, his attentiveness to detail, nothing was an accident. Everything he has, he worked for.’’
Nunez-Roches is in his ninth NFL season and first with the Giants, having been signed this past offseason after five years with the Buccaneers — which included a 2021 Super Bowl run. He had only seen Williams from afar, and he admired what he saw.
Williams certainly does look the part at 6-foot-5, 300 pounds. And surely that, along with how high he was drafted, was used to knock his performance down as not good enough early in his career. But Williams has always been a diligent worker who’s done a good job of not getting caught up in the perception that he wasn’t meeting expectations.
Nunez-Roches has been so impressed with Williams in his short time with the team, he felt compelled to tell him that recently.
“I had to tell him the other day, I was like, ‘Bro, I respect everything that you do,’ ’’ Nunez-Roches said. “I love his approach to pass rush, his wisdom. I was just like, ‘Man, seeing you do what you do, it puts in perspective why my bank account looks like it looks and yours look like it looks.’ ”
Nunez-Roches was signed in March to a three-year deal worth $12 million, with $7.5 guaranteed — which is $37.5 million less in guaranteed money than Williams got. And he has no gripes about it.
“Even though he is as big as he is and as gifted as he is, in his head, he’s just like anybody else,’’ Nunez-Roches said. “He’s willing to learn. He’s willing to take criticism from anybody — literally anybody. ‘What can I do better? What am I doing wrong?’ To have those things and already be so ahead of a lot of people, it just boosts his game.’’
Williams on Tuesday sounded like a player who has a score to settle with 2022, when he missed five games, first with a knee injury and later with a neck strain. His 114 consecutive-game streak was snapped in Week 3 with the knee injury.
“I missed a few games last year for the first time in my career,’’ Williams said. “That’s something that I pride myself on most of my career, being healthy and being durable and being ready to go when called upon. So, this offseason I definitely focused a lot on my body.
“Knowing that I am getting a little bit older and knowing that I have to apply myself more in the training room and keep up with things on my body is going to be important going forward for me.’’