The NBA’s silly season — and many would say the most sketchy part of the regular season — ends this weekend.
The period between the Feb. 6 trade deadline and March 1 is what’s come to be known as “buyout season,” when players engineer departures from teams going nowhere so that they can sign on with playoff-bound teams and have something legitimate to play for in the final 25 or so games.
The timing rub is that players have to be free of their former teams and signed with their new ones by March 1 to be playoff eligible, if they’ve been in the NBA at all this season.