Plaxico Burress Released by New York Giants

It just wasn't meant to be.

The New York Giants could no longer bear the pressure of keeping their No. 1 receiver Plaxico Burress on the team, so they've released him. My guess is that when a recent court date turned up no resolution, they decided parting ways with their troubled receiver.

The receiver has been in legal troubles since shooting himself in the leg at a night club in Manhattan.

There was hope in Giants-land that a resolution would have been made recently, but it seemed the wheels of justice do spin slowly, and the Giants ran out of patience.

Plaxico's situation was applying constant pressure to the Giants' organization on many fronts.  The pressure included a recent arbitration hearing for a signing bonus the Giants withheld from him, intense public attention to the matter, the lack of a No. 1 receiving option currently on their roster, and Plaxico's agent emailing other teams to see if they were interested. That pressure is now partly relieved.

No one knows why the Giants finally decided to release Burress.

Was the last straw an arbitration hearing held a couple of days ago, in which Plaxico's Union was arguing that off the field troubles have nothing to do with eliminating a signing bonus owed to him?

Was it the fact that a court hearing turned no resolution, even after months of waiting, or that jail time would be unavoidable in his case?

We don't know, because the Giants GM, Jerry Reese, on the Giants.com website, said nothing today about a specific reason for letting Plax go.

All we have is this statement and we must read the words carefully to try to understand what the reasons driving this decision.

“I am an optimist, and I believe most situations can be worked out,” said General Manager Jerry Reese. “We hung in there as long as we could in hopes that there could be a resolution to this situation other than the decision we made today to release Plaxico. It wasn’t to be, so now we have to move on. Like everybody else here, we want nothing but the best for Plaxico, and we are appreciative of the contributions he made to this franchise.”

In his statement, Reese used the word “optimist.” This means he was looking for something positive in a rather bleak situation, and finally saw dead ends. This situation did not have a resolution favorable to the Giants.

He used the words “hung in there” as if to mean he was waiting until the last possible moment. He considered public opinion before doing what some of us knew the Giants wanted to do in the first place—get rid of him.

Finally, he used the words, “It wasn't to be”, indicating that something very recent had made their decision easier.