Young Giants can seize leadership chance as injuries ravage roster

The void keeps growing and growing and growing.

Giants captains and leaders keep falling one by one, leaving the roster concerningly lacking strong voices in the locker room to rally around.

The latest hits have come to their defense, with Dexter Lawrence out for the rest of the season with a dislocated elbow and Bobby Okereke unlikely to play Sunday against the Saints with a back injury.

Okereke did not practice Wednesday or Thursday and is considered week-to-week.

Lawrence and Okereke are team captains, leaving just one the five captains still standing — long-snapper Casey Kreiter.

On offense, Daniel Jones was cut and Andrew Thomas has long been out for the season due to a foot injury. And Lawrence and Okereke were the two captains on defense.

No offense to Kreiter, but the long-snapper likely isn’t keeping the locker room together. There are only a handful of established veterans who command respect, and very few — like Adoree’ Jackson, Darius Slayton and Jason Pinnock — are likely to even be back next year.

Who is there left to turn to?

“You definitely notice it,” Brian Burns, one of those few remaining influential veterans with a future on the team, told The Post after practice Thursday. “Just because of their presence and their impact. … Their impact speaks for itself. I think everyone’s done a good job of keeping the main thing the main thing and realizing that we might be missing them guys, but we gotta get a job done.

“People step up in different ways all the time. [Pinnock], Micah [McFadden], there’s been plenty of guys that lead in certain ways. I think it’s a team effort.”

McFadden is certainly one candidate to take on a bigger leadership role. He has started every game this year at inside linebacker alongside Okereke.

If Okereke doesn’t play Sunday, McFadden likely will take over the green-dot helmet responsibilities, relaying the defensive calls to his teammates.

He’s hardly a veteran, though — he’s in his third season with the team after being drafted in the fifth round in 2022.

“Whenever you have guys of that caliber not at practice, you definitely notice those guys not being there, for sure,” McFadden told The Post. “It just takes all of us to step up and try to fill that void. You can’t replace a Dexter Lawrence. If we all communicate, we’re all on the same page, we all play with great effort, we can try and fill a little bit of that gap.”

But McFadden’s needing to potentially rise as a leader is indicative of where the Giants stand.

They possess an extremely young roster, filled with first-, second- and third-year players getting significant playing time all over the field.

If there’s a bright side to this miserable 2-10 season, it’s that much of that youth has seen plenty of action and gotten plenty of reps in order to develop.

That youth has also recently come under the microscope for its comments, though.

Rookie Malik Nabers, in particular, has been vocal and expletive-laden about the team’s struggles and how much he’s being thrown to.

He subsequently defended the notion that a rookie called out his teammates, and third-year Kayvon Thibodeaux later said that the ability to speak out “is a meritocracy.

So, if you make plays, you have a voice. If you don’t make plays, you don’t have a voice.”

The few plays the Giants have made this year have largely come from their youth and promising rookie class — Nabers, Tyrone Tracy, Tyler Nubin and Dru Phillips, in particular.

So, if nothing else, these last five weeks provide them a chance to grow as leaders and find their voice on a team that badly needs as many of them as it can find.

“I think we’re always trying to evolve that leadership, especially in the young guys, and develop that,” defensive coordinator Shane Bowen said. “Part of being a coach is to foster that a little bit, especially with the guys that can handle it. I think you got to be careful. There’s certain guys that can take on a little bit more in that role and there’s other guys who probably aren’t ready for that just yet.

“But yeah, absolutely, I think within the position group, especially. Like, who rises in the defensive line group with (Lawrence) out? Where’s that voice go?”