After firing their coach and general manager, the New York Giants are a team in transition. New general manager Dave Gettleman vowed to build the offense around an effective running game and backed up his words during the draft, when his first two picks were dynamic Penn State running back Saquon Barkley and bruising UTEP guard Will Hernandez. In the process, Gettleman declined to use the second overall pick on a quarterback to replace Eli Manning, and while 2017 third-rounder Davis Webb and fourth-round pick Kyle Lauletta will be developing behind the longtime stalwart, there's no obvious quarterback of the future in the fold. That particular transition is yet to come.

New York's other consideration is figuring out what to do with its best player. Wideout Odell Beckham Jr. missed most of 2017 with various injuries, starting with a preseason ankle injury and ending with a fractured fibula. In his absence, the Giants' offense was more of a theoretical construct than a going concern for opponents. The 2017 Giants were fatally flawed to an extent that Beckham would not have been able to single-handedly save them, but he might have been able to restore Ben McAdoo's scheme to some semblance of adequacy. Nobody with eyes or a memory questions what the LSU product can do.

After failing to come to terms on a contract extension last offseason, Beckham now enters the fifth-year option of his rookie deal in advance of unrestricted free agency next offseason. In about 98 percent of cases, we would be talking about the inevitability of an extension or a franchise tag. Teams don't let players like Beckham leave in the prime of their careers unless something has gone horribly wrong.

As we sit here in mid-June, though, that 2 percent suddenly feels like a plausible possibility. Beckham has reportedly been seeking a deal that would shatter the wide receiver market. He's up against a general manager with little patience for egos on a team with cap concerns. There are the dreaded off-field concerns.

Let's answer the biggest questions around Beckham's future:

How often do teams let young players as talented as Beckham leave?

It's rare. We can go back and forth about whether Beckham is the most talented wide receiver in the NFL when healthy, but it's clear that he's among the NFL's best players. Consider that Beckham made the Pro Bowl three consecutive times to start his career before missing out because of injury last season. Since 1990, 68 players (44 inactive and 24 active, excluding special teams contributors) have managed to make it to three or more Pro Bowls in their first four seasons, including a record nine from Beckham's draft class.

As you might suspect, these players often continue to have excellent careers. The retired players in this group finished their careers with an average of 11.5 seasons in the league. Thirty-one guys from this group are eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame and nearly half -- 45 percent -- are already enshrined in Canton. Players such as Champ Bailey, Troy Polamalu and Jason Witten are locks to join them in the years to come.

Odell Beckham Jr. caught 35 touchdown passes in his first three seasons, and now he's looking for a massive contract extension. Al Bello/Getty Images

Polamalu and Witten spent their entire NFL careers with one team, and indeed, players who are superstars early in their pro careers often stay where they initially landed. Organizations dream of drafting players who break out into immediate superstars, so it's no surprise that they hold onto them with both hands for as long as possible. Those retired players combined to spend more than 75 percent of their respective careers with the team that initially drafted them.

The exceptions to that trend fit a few simple cases. Eleven retired or inactive players from that list of 44 moved on within six seasons of entering the league, which would be the case if the Giants moved on from Beckham either after his rookie contract ends or following a franchise tag in 2019. Five of them -- LaVar Arrington, Jevon Kearse, Jake Long, Shawne Merriman and Lofa Tatupu -- suffered serious injuries that impacted their quality of play. Champ Bailey and Jerome Bettis were traded to acquire or open space for running backs, moves that their original teams would come to regret. Curtis Martin and Ricky Watters were signed away from their initial teams as restricted free agents through an offer-sheet structure that no longer exists. The other two players were Randy Moss and Jeremy Shockey, who were traded away after signing extensions and subsequently falling out of favor with their previous organizations.

It's too early to judge the staying power of active players, but of the 24 current NFL players who made three Pro Bowls during their first four seasons, just two have left the teams that drafted them. Ndamukong Suh hit unrestricted free agency when the Lions drafted three great players at the top of the first round under the peak of the old collective bargaining agreement and were forced to make a choice between Suh and Calvin Johnson for cap reasons. More recently, the Dolphins decided to trade Jarvis Landry after an attempt to create trade value by slapping him with the franchise tag went poorly.

That's it. The 22 other players are essentially cherished franchise icons. Earl Thomas might leave Seattle after he finishes his ninth season in the Pacific Northwest this season, but teams aren't looking to deal or move on from these players. Even given the Landry trade, it would be an historical anomaly if the Giants were to move on from Beckham.

How much would it cost to re-sign Beckham?

When Beckham was agitating for a contract extension last offseason, I wrote about how the economics of an extension didn't make sense. The Giants had Beckham under cost control over the next four years at a total of $50.6 million without having to make any sort of long-term commitment, which didn't remotely fit with Beckham's interest in becoming the highest-paid wide receiver in league history. It's the same reason the Rams weren't able to find common ground with Aaron Donald.

Beckham played in only four games in 2017 after breaking his ankle in early October. Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

With the first four years of Beckham's rookie deal now out of the way, though, the math on an extension begins to make more sense. OBJ will get $8.5 million for his fifth-year option this season. After that, the Giants would need to play the franchise tag game. We don't have tag values for the years to come, but a simple estimate for the 2019 wideout tag comes in at $16 million. The Giants could then franchise Beckham in 2020 at $18.4 million and again in 2021 at $26.5 million.

That's a fundamentally different contractual landscape from last year. If the Giants don't want to make a long-term commitment and wanted to go year-to-year, they would owe Beckham $43.7 million over the next three seasons, which is right in line with what the Packers are paying Davante Adams ($43.9 million) over that same time frame. For four years, the price tag goes up to $71.4 million, which is more than the $68 million Antonio Brown got on his extension in February 2017. We're in the price range where a Beckham extension makes financial sense.

Beckham's camp has thrown a big round number out to the media. The former LSU star reportedly wants an annual average salary of $20 million per year, which would be a comfortable leap on the current standard, given that Brown's extension set the bar for average wideout salary at $17 million. It's also not an especially meaningful number, given that the Giants can inflate the back end of the deal with average salaries Beckham is unlikely to ever see.

At most positions, the largest contracts belong to players who just signed their deals over the past 12 months. That's not the case at wide receiver. Two wideouts have signed nine-figure deals, but those contracts were signed in 2011 and 2012. Larry Fitzgerald signed a seven-year, $113 million deal in August 2011, only for Calvin Johnson to top him with a seven-year, $113.5 million contract the following March. Neither deal is still an active concern, given that Megatron is retired and the Cardinals have repeatedly renegotiated Fitzgerald's contract.

The best measure of contracts is three-year value, which is the amount of money a player is in line to actually pocket over the first three seasons of any new deal. The top five there includes many of the contracts we've mentioned above and two close comparables for Beckham:

Player Year of

Deal Years Max Gtd at

Signing First 3

Years Mike Evans 2018 5 $82.5M $38.3M $55M Calvin Johnson 2012 7 $113.5M $46.8M $51.8M Larry Fitzgerald 2011 7 $113M $27M $51M DeAndre Hopkins 2017 5 $81M $36.5M $49M Antonio Brown 2017 4 $68M $19M $48.9M

The Buccaneers never hand out signing bonuses to veterans and don't guarantee more than two years of base salaries, so they had to offer Evans a significant jump in three-year value on the previous record to stick within their contractual structure. Under Gettleman, the Panthers were far more comfortable handing out signing bonuses, so the structure of a Beckham deal would be entirely different from the one the Bucs just gave Evans.

If you were going to construct a feasible Beckham deal that set records across the board, here's one way to do it. Let Beckham keep the $8.5 million he's due to make this year and tack on a five-year, $100 million extension, giving OBJ that magic $20 million figure on his extension. The entire contract runs six years and $108.5 million, for a more accurate average of $18.1 million per season, which tops Brown's deal. We also can pay Beckham $58 million over three years, although to fit all those other demands, it's going to come with a catch in the structure. Here's what the deal would look like:

Year Base

Salary Signing

Bonus Option

Bonus Roster

Bonus Cap

Hit 2018 $1M $4M $0 $5M $10M 2019 $6M $4M $0 $3.5M $13.5M 2020 $10M $4 M $3M $500K $17.5M 2021 $13M $4M $3M $500K $20.5M 2022 $16M $4M $3M $500K $23.5M 2023 $20M $0 $3M $500K $23.5M Total $66M $20M $12M $10.5M $108.5M

At signing, the Giants would pay Beckham his $20 million bonus while guaranteeing his first two roster bonuses (totaling $8.5 million) and his first two base salaries ($7 million) in full. They also would guarantee $4 million of his 2020 base salary for a total guarantee at signing of $39.5 million. That tops the $38.3 million Evans just got from Tampa in his new deal.

Crucially, though, the Giants get an out on the second half of this deal by virtue of that unguaranteed option bonus in 2020, which would pay Beckham what amounts to a second signing bonus of $12 million and subsequently make it difficult to move on from their star receiver until 2022. If Gettleman finds that Beckham isn't worth what the Giants invested after two years, they could cut OBJ after paying him that $39.5 million over two years. They would eat a painful $16 million in dead money, but they could spread that over the 2020 and 2021 caps, at which point Manning is unlikely to be on the roster.

How good has Beckham really been?

Very, very good. By just about any measure, historically so. When you compare the first three seasons of Beckham's career to those of every other receiver since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, Beckham looks like an all-time great in the making. He's tied for the most receptions through three years with Landry, ranks second in receiving yards behind Moss, and is fifth in receiving touchdowns. Even if you go through years 1-4 and acknowledge that Beckham missed most of the 2017 season through injuries, he ranks among the top nine in each of those receiving categories.

There's an unfair element to that analysis, though, given that Beckham is playing in a league in which it's easier to rack up receiving yardage than ever before. You might argue that the NFL has shifted to a passing-friendly approach in part because of the presence of dominant receivers like Beckham, but if we want to contextualize just how good Beckham has been, we have to work a little harder and compare players versus the other receivers of their respective eras.