Big Apple Sports: All New York Sports. All The Time.

Don Banks of Sports Illustrated published a list of 10 Draft-day moves that should happen on Saturday.  If you want to read the entire list, click here.  But here are two of the 10 moves that relate to the Big Apple football teams:

1. The Giants trade Jeremy Shockey to the Saints: New York can spin it any way it likes, but the reality is the Giants got a glimpse of life without Shockey from mid-December on last season, and it wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was better.

Eli Manning was undeniably at his best and the Giants offense was more balanced and varied without the constraints of having to ensure Shockey was happy with his level of involvement. In addition, rookie tight end Kevin Boss showed legitimate promise in the postseason.

Shockey has never fully bought into head coach Tom Coughlin’s program, and he promises to be even more of a potential problem now that he has let it be known he doesn’t care for his blocking assignments and has grown bothered by the perception that the Giants won it all in part because he missed everything after Week 15 due to injury. Super Bowl success has freed New York to do the right thing for its locker room, and that spells moving an unhappy player while he still has significant value.

New York is never going to get New Orleans to give up both its second-round pick (No. 40 overall) and starting safety Roman Harper (a second-round pick in ‘06), who has been the best player in the Saints’ sometimes shaky secondary. New York should settle for the second-rounder, plus a fifth, and then use its picks at No. 31 and 40 to take the best available safety and outside linebacker, filling its two most obvious needs. The Giants might come away with a safety prospect like Miami’s Kenny Phillips or Arkansas State’s Tyrell Johnson with one of those picks, and maybe a linebacker such as Penn State’s Dan Connor or Oklahoma’s Curtis Lofton with the other.

At No. 40, New York could also choose to replace Shockey with a younger, healthier, cheaper version in Purdue tight end Dustin Keller, maybe waiting until its No. 63 second-round pick to select its linebacker in Xavier Adibi of Virginia Tech. As for Shockey, he’d be a big upgrade for the Saints tight end position, where he’d play a major role in an offense he’s familiar with. Saints head coach Sean Payton was his offensive coordinator with the Giants in his rookie season of 2002, when Shockey caught a career-best 74 passes for 894 yards).

9. The Jets draft Matt Ryan: While the latest buzz has Ryan going to the No. 3 Falcons after all, I still think Atlanta would be wiser to take Dorsey with its first pick and use some of its three second-round selections as ammo to land either Brohm, Henne or Flacco late in the opening round.

Doing it that way, the Falcons could almost certainly add an impact player on both sides of the ball at the top of their draft. Taking the quarterback at No. 3 means it’s unlikely they’d be able to affect their defense as dramatically in round two as Dorsey would in round one.

But New York isn’t in the same position as Atlanta, and has to get better quarterback play if it has any hopes of closing the gap on the Patriots in the AFC East. Chad Pennington is on borrowed time with the Jets, and Kellen Clemens remains a question mark who came at the price of a second-round pick in 2006. If the Jets are as high on Ryan as indications allow, and he makes it to their No. 6 slot, they should pull the trigger and not think twice.