Condition of Jason Pierre-Paul’s hand worse than expected, report says

Well, it took less than a week after the New York Giants met with defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul for someone to leak damaging information about his condition to the media.

An ESPN report on Saturday night said Pierre-Paul’s injuries are worse than the Giants feared, that in addition to an amputated index finger and a fractured thumb on his right hand, a portion of one of the other fingers on Pierre-Paul’s right hand is gone. The report said some people within the organization fear he’ll miss he entire season.

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Pierre-Paul was injured in a fireworks accident on July 4 and didn’t meet with the Giants until Monday. There were likely a few logical reasons for that, but one might have been that he didn’t want information about his injuries becoming public. The only reason we knew about the amputated finger was because someone leaked a hospital report to ESPN this summer. Pierre-Paul had tried to protect the condition of his hand, for whatever reasons he had. That didn’t last long after the Giants met with him.

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The latest report is in contrast to the relatively optimistic reports on Monday, which indicated he was in good shape and could return soon. But there are contractual issues to figure out too, and Pierre-Paul left the building without signing his franchise tender. The ESPN report said the Giants don’t plan to pull the tender because it’s not costing them anything as long as Pierre-Paul is unsigned. If Pierre-Paul signed it before he could play, the Giants could stick him on the non-football injury (NFI) list and not pay him.

The Giants don’t know when or if Pierre-Paul will play this season. But we do know now that the damage to his hand is even worse than we thought the past few weeks.

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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab