YOU might think it odd that the Giants can lose two of their most effective offensive weapons and actually become far more dangerous as a team. You might think it strange that Tiki Barber can retire and Jeremy Shockey can break his leg, and suddenly a team that couldn’t get out of its own postseason way has become a January juggernaut.
Or maybe this doesn’t surprise you a bit. Really, it shouldn’t. From up close, we’ve long been taught the lessons of addition-by-subtraction, and subtraction-by-addition. We’ve seen the work of Stephon Marbury and Alex Rodriguez, two of the greatest coolers in sports history. We’ve watched them perform their mystical magic right in our backyard.
Rodriguez left the Mariners after the 2000 season, and in 2001 they won 25 more games without him. He left the Rangers after 2003, and in 2004, Texas won 18 more games, upped its winning percentage by 111 points.
Marbury’s work is even more impressive: the 1999-2000 Timberwolves bumped their winning percentage by 110 points without him. The 2001-02 Nets doubled their win total from 26 to 52 and made it to the NBA Finals without him. The 2003-04 Suns went from a .354 winning percentage with to a .756 winning percentage without. Hell, even this year’s abysmal Knicks won four of the first five games he missed after shutting himself down.
This stuff happens. It’s real. And with these Giants, it just so happens that we’ve seen the reverse happen. Tiki can talk about how thrilled he is for the Giants to have made it to the Super Bowl without him, and maybe he even means it. Shockey, who has vanished from the Giants the way military losses used to disappear from Russian history books, nobody knows what he’s thinking.
But here is the cold, and cold-blooded, truth:
The Giants have proven to be better without Barber, their all-time rusher. They have proven to be better without Shockey, who despite his lacking career numbers is right up there with Mark Bavaro among the team’s all-time most gifted tight ends.
Is this a coincidence? Is it a corollary? Is it a little of both?
Consider these three quotes:
“You can’t expect to lose talent and not suffer for it. Maybe the other guys just understood they had to make up the slack. They’re pretty damn good, too, you know.”
“Team sports are about playing like a team. That’s all I’ll say.”
“When you have a bunch of guys playing toward a common goal, it’s amazing what you’re capable of doing.”
In order, that’s Lou Piniella talking in the summer of 2001, Byron Scott talking in the winter of 2002, and Tom Coughlin talking just a few weeks ago. Without naming names, they were all quick to identify the upside to parting with players of sublime ability: Sometimes the whole really is better than the sum of the parts, even if the parts don’t seem up to the task.
In the Giants’ case, the direct link between the missing stars and the results is an easy one to identify, because there is no question at all any longer to whom the offensive huddle belongs. We heard plenty from Tiki in the summer about how “laughable” Eli Manning was, how passive he was. The point Tiki failed to raise, of course, is how much he and his larger-than-life personality (and quick-to-criticize mouth) had to do with that. Same deal with Shockey, forever grumbling about his role in the offense, forever lugging his alternately dark and manic moods to the locker room and the huddle.
Could the Giants use Barber’s legs and Shockey’s hands in the battle against the Patriots in Phoenix two Sundays from now? Of course they could; only a fool would want to play a Super Bowl with a golf-style handicap. The problem is, neither Barber nor Shockey would come in a vacuum. They would bring everything else with them, too – their personalities, their opinions, their ego-centric ways.
And that, the Giants don’t need. That much the evidence – and the record – has shown us clearly and eloquently.
michael.vaccaro@
nypost.com