LANDOVER, Md. – There is a time to take chances, and a time to cut losses. There is talent worth the hassle and headache that go along with it, and there are the hassles and headaches that make no amount of talent worth the effort.
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Plaxico Burress has officially reached that place with the Giants now – officially no longer worth the extra energy and effort that goes along with keeping him a part of the team.
Placating Plax has long been a full-time job for the Giants, anyway. But now, after word comes that a bullet wound up in his right thigh – shot from his apparently unlicensed gun, at that – this is overtime that no one associated with the Giants needs.
There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened early yesterday in the LQ nightclub, but what we do know is troubling enough:
* Burress was allegedly toting a gun to a Midtown club.
* The sure-handed receiver apparently can’t handle a gun safely.
* And he was lucky enough to suffer only a slight wound – and luckier still that no one else was hurt.
Most troubling is that we know Burress again found himself in the kind situation where only bad things happen and where cops want to ask you questions. If this were an isolated incident – say, like teammate Kareem MacKenzie’s recent DUI arrest – perhaps it would be only a red flag.
But this isn’t an aberration. It is a culmination, a climax to a busy season of discontent and disconnect for Burress, which included a protracted salary dispute, blowing off practice that resulted in a one-game suspension (a game, not coincidentally, the Giants won in a rout) and an even more disquieting nonchalance when he returned from the ban.
The Giants were willing to tolerate Placating Plax an awful long way, all the way through his game-winning catch at Super Bowl XLII and all the way to a $15 million contract extension. But Burress has kept pushing, kept tugging, kept kicking. And Giants GM Jerry Reese is too smart a personnel man not to recognize the fine line between irreverence and irresponsibility.
Burress now finds himself on the same side of the line that Jeremy Shockey ultimately found himself last year without ever pulling the trigger of a gun. Ultimately, your presence will be tolerated until your insolence is greater than your usefulness.
Maybe the Giants should have learned from other teams’ lessons. Latrell Sprewell was a soul worth saving for the Knicks until he ultimately became a cancer in his own clubhouse. There are similarities aplenty between Sprewell and Burress, right down to this: ultimately, keeping Sprewell would have meant losing something much deeper, much greater. It was one of the last smart things the Knicks did until recently.
Ultimately, a team has to live with itself. And the Giants, ultimately, will live with themselves a lot more peacefully when they cut ties with No. 17 and allow some other team to engage in the difficult art of Placating Plax.