2020 Summer Sleeper: New York Giants

Eric Hardter

In our annual 32-part Summer Sleeper series, DLF scribes identify a lightly-touted player on each NFL roster who may be worthy of your consideration. Our subjects all have varying levels of “sleeperness,” but each merits a bit of in-depth discussion here in the Premium Content section.

To help everybody along, we are going to be categorizing our sleepers under one of three headings:

Super Deep SleepersPlayers who aren’t roster-worthy in 12-team leagues, but are still worth keeping an eye on.
Deep Sleepers – An end of the roster player who is more often than not on the waiver wire in 12-team leagues.
Sleeper – A likely rostered player who makes for a good trade target. Their startup ADP puts them out of the top-175 or so.

Because we aren’t going to give you the likes of mainstream sleepers, most of these players will undoubtedly fizzle. All we are asking is for you to keep an open mind and perhaps be willing to make room for one of these players on your bench. You never know when the next Adam Thielen is going to spring up. Feel free to add your own thoughts about our choice for the designated sleeper, or nominate one of your own in the comments below.

Despite the myriad of injuries suffered across literally every skill position, the 2019 rendition of the New York Football Giants proved to be fertile grounds for fantasy production. To that point, the offense included the QB12 (by average points) in Daniel Jones (three games missed), the overall PPR RB10 in Saquon Barkley (three games missed), and a trio of PPR top-50 receivers in Darius Slayton, Golden Tate and Sterling Shepard (13 combined games missed). Even tight end Evan Engram managed to finish as a mid-range PPR TE2 (overall TE18) despite playing literally half of the season, with the seventh-highest per-game average.

Unfortunately, missed time has been nothing new for the soon-to-be fourth-year tight end. In fact, he’s trending in the wrong direction, with one, five, and eight missed games successively over the last three seasons. Maladies incurred include a pair of concussions, bruised ribs, two MCL sprains, a pulled hamstring, and finally a sprained foot.

While none of these injuries appear to be inherently related, Engram’s gameday absences seem to have rankled the Giants’ front office. In March of this year, rumors were circulating that the former first-round pick would find his way onto the trading block, as “the Giants don’t believe he can ever stay healthy.” Should management tire of the talented but oft-sidelined tight end, or should he succumb to yet another visit to the training table, it might just open up the door for…

Kaden Smith, TE

Category: Deep Sleeper

In the preamble above I’ve provided at least a snippet of an argument for “why NOT Evan Engram?” Of course, that begs the logical follow-up question – why Kaden Smith?

On the surface, there shouldn’t inherently be much reason for optimism. Smith was a 2019 sixth-round selection by the San Francisco 49ers, who, while admittedly having one of the league’s deeper rosters, kicked him to the curb early in the season to make room for the immortal Jeff Wilson. His meager draft status and short stint in the Bay Area were not terribly surprising given his uninspiring performance at the NFL Combine, including a 4.92-second 40-yard dash, and subpar numbers in the vertical and broad jumps and bench press. While he was solid enough in his two years on the field at Stanford (70-1,049-7 across 20 games), there was precious little about his collegiate and athletic profiles to suggest he would be an NFL contributor.

When Engram went down, however, Smith stepped in and stepped up. Despite not seeing a single target until the second week of November, Smith managed to compile a very reasonable 31-268-3 line across seven games. This included five games with at least five targets, and two games with 70 or more yards. He saved his very best for last, with an aggregate 14-133-2 over the season’s final two contests (19 total targets). All told, Smith finagled his way into a finish as a low-end TE3 (PPR TE35), and the TE12 by average points.

Of note, Smith’s lack of dynamic clearly translated to a role as a catch-and-fall artist with just 8.6 yards per reception. However, he made up for that with his reliability, catching a robust 73.8% of his passes, which compares favorably to Engram’s career rate of 61.9%. He also managed to turn 28.6% of his targets into first downs, which is not terribly far off Engram’s career rate of 33.2%. He doesn’t do much work after the catch (2.9 YAC per reception), but plays his role as short-area target well.

Advanced metrics were also kind to the 2019 rookie. Recently I wrote up the results of an analysis using my Adjusted Improvement Ratio (AIR) metric, conveniently enough for the top 35 PPR tight ends of 2019. Briefly, if you didn’t read the article or are unfamiliar with the metric, it effectively normalizes per-target efficiency both within and across all NFL rosters, accounting for the fact that not all targets are created equal.

Impressively, Smith’s AIR score of 1.179 finished 11th among all 35 players profiled, as he scored 8.2% of the team’s PPR points on 6.9% of the targets. While this is a small sample size potentially prone to regression, it could also be indicative of how many points Smith could score if everything breaks right in 2020. Comparatively, Engram’s AIR score of 1.044 (11.7% of the team’s PPR points on 11.2% of the targets), though slightly above average, was a bottom-ten value of all players profiled, and well below Smith.

I’m not going to leave you in suspense here. Engram is the obvious tight end play on the team, and I’m not going to assert that Smith will even achieve his 2019 numbers should the former stay healthy. But at the least, a quick glimpse across the last couple of weeks of news in the New York media yields some hope, if only judging by the article titles:

  • How Kaden Smith Can Become a Viable Target in the New York Giants Passing Game
  • Kaden Smith Has Breakout Potential in 2020
  • Cover Three: Don’t Sleep on These Giants Players
  • Is Kaden Smith the Giants’ Biggest Sleeper in 2020?
  • Giants Hope Kaden Smith Can Build Off Solid Rookie Year
  • Kaden Smith Could Be a Big Piece to the Offensive Puzzle in 2020

After only being selected in half of the mock drafts comprising the July ADP (TE37 overall), Smith is a solid deep sleeper, and makes for a savvy speculative add on the end of your bench.

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eric hardter