Every year around the trade deadline, a handful of bad teams simply release good players (or formerly good players, anyway) so they can sign with good teams for close to nothing ahead of the playoffs.

The buyout market is one of the strangest but widely accepted aspects of the present-day NBA. It allows lottery teams to focus on developing their younger players and curry favor with agents while contenders in certain markets provide veterans with an avenue for late-career ring-chasing.

So far this time around, the Brooklyn Nets are cleaning up. They already snagged Blake Griffin after he parted ways with the Detroit Pistons, and ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski reported Saturday evening that they're poised to land LaMarcus Aldridge in the near future.

If this was seven years or so ago, the Nets would have the most loaded team in NBA history. It's a mashup of the early-2010s Oklahoma City Thunder (Kevin Durant, James Harden and Jeff Green) and Lob City-era Los Angeles Clippers (Griffin and DeAndre Jordan), plus perennial All-Stars from those eras of the Cleveland Cavaliers (Kyrie Irving) and Portland Trail Blazers (Aldridge). All that's missing are uniforms nobody can agree are white and gold or blue and black.

Another guy whose best years happened in roughly that same time frame is Andre Drummond, who reached a buyout agreement with the Cavs after the deadline and is widely expected to join the Los Angeles Lakers in the coming days. Multiple reports had Drummond joining the Lakers as a done deal a week ago; his reported post-buyout discussions with the Knicks and Celtics appeared more to serve as plausible deniability for the inevitable tampering accusations, because no one in the NBA would ever have a deal in place before they're allowed to.

Whenever a player like Griffin or Drummond hits the open market midseason and quickly joins one of the same handful of teams, it's accompanied by a measure of hand-wringing about the ability of select teams to stack the deck with players that casual fans might have heard of from the All-Star teams they made a half-decade ago. Those old enough to remember the Cavs adding Deron Williams in 2017 or the Rockets adding Joe Johnson in 2018 will tell you most of these big names are available for free because they don't have enough left in the tank for teams to want to trade for.

The occasional buyout guy makes a real impact. Boris Diaw seemed completely finished in Charlotte but went on to play a key role on the Spurs' 2013 and 2014 Finals teams. P.J. Brown came in off the couch for the 2008 Celtics and hit one of the biggest shots of their title run.

Most of them, though, are closer to the 2019 Bucks version of Pau Gasol than they are to Diaw, or even the Lakers' midseason acquisition of Markieff Morris last year en route to the bubble championship.

At 27, Drummond has much better odds of moving the needle for the Lakers than either Aldridge or Griffin do for the Nets. His production hasn't gotten meaningfully worse from his two All-Star seasons last decade—he's still a rebounding machine and volume scorer in the paint—but the landscape of the league has shifted to de-emphasize traditional centers with no perimeter game. That combined with his $27.8 million salary is why he had no trade market. 

There's a clear role for Drummond with the Lakers, who need help up front with Anthony Davis on the shelf and Marc Gasol still working his way back after recovering from COVID-19. If Davis and LeBron James are both healthy for the playoffs (a big if), the Lakers should still be the favorites to come out of the West.

The Nets' situation is a little more uncertain. Durant hasn't played in almost two months as he deals with a hamstring issue. They're still dominating behind an MVP-caliber stretch from Harden and the emergence of young big man Nicolas Claxton, whose minutes Aldridge and Griffin could cut directly into. 

If Durant, Irving and Harden are at full strength, it may not matter much whether the two best power forwards in the league circa 2013-14 can still contribute in 2021. Aldridge and Griffin will serve as insurance policies for each other, and for Jordan, who's also in his early-30s and well past his All-Star days. Aldridge is the better bet of the two to be productive, without nearly the injury history Griffin has.

But if the Nets are counting on either of them to be the difference between winning a title and falling short, chances are they're in for a disappointment.

Sean Highkin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon and lives in Portland. His work has been honored by the Pro Basketball Writers' Association. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and in the B/R App.