Michael Floyd is the Patriots’ latest attempt to find treasure in another team’s trash

The New England Patriots are a win away from clinching the AFC East and a first-round bye in the playoffs — so it’s really just another year in Bill Belichick’s world. And leading the way once again is Tom Brady, but it’s a mostly new cast of characters otherwise.

Even with Rob Gronkowski lost for the season due to back surgery and Danny Amendola possibly done for the remainder of the regular season due to a high-ankle sprain, there are still some familiar faces. Julian Edelman is leading the team in receiving and LeGarrette Blount in rushing, but throughout the roster are players who were once thought to be valued pieces of the future for other franchises.

On Thursday, the Patriots scooped up Michael Floyd a day after the Arizona Cardinals waived the wide receiver due to a DUI arrest earlier in the week. Aside from the arrest, the reality is that Floyd just wasn’t playing well for the Cardinals.

When Arizona selected him with the No. 13 pick in the 2012 NFL draft, the team had to have had bigger things in mind than 33 receptions, 446 yards and four touchdowns in 13 games by his fifth NFL season. He did have 1,041 yards in 2013 and more than 800 yards in the last two seasons, but his play continued to decline and the Cardinals may have been more forgiving of his arrest if he was a more valuable piece on the offense.

“Deeply disappointed it didn’t work out,” Cardinals team president Michael Bidwill told NFL.com. “He was a 2012 first-round draft choice for us, a person we thought would eventually take Larry Fitzgerald’s position and be the number one receiver for the future.”

Floyd, 27, will now try to fill that role in New England, although he’s scheduled to become a free agent in the offseason. He joins a roster that features plenty of other players who were selected early by another team but acquired by the Patriots for cheap when things didn’t work out.

Chris Long, Shea McClellin and Barkevious Mingo were all former first-round picks scooped by New England at discount prices.

Long, the No. 2 overall pick of the St. Louis Rams in 2008, was easily the most successful of the three on his first team and once recorded 24.5 sacks over a two-year span. But when he had only four sacks in his last two seasons in St. Louis, he signed just a one-year, $2 million deal with the Patriots.

McClellin landed a three-year, $9 million deal four years after the Chicago Bears took him with the No. 19 selection in 2012, and Mingo was acquired in a trade with the Cleveland Browns, who selected him with the No. 6 pick in 2013 but accepted just a 2017 fifth-round pick in return.

Also on the roster are Kyle Van Noy, Jabaal Sheard and Eric Rowe — all former second-round draft picks.

Is it a winning strategy? Considering this is the 14th consecutive season of double-digit wins for the Patriots, every strategy of Belichick’s is a winning strategy, by definition.

But it’s hard to point to any of the former top draft picks of other teams currently on the Patriots’ roster and say they’re an integral part of the team’s success in 2016. Many have contributed, but none are playing anywhere close to a Pro Bowl level.

In a Monday Night Football victory over the Baltimore Ravens, Van Noy made an athletic pass deflection and almost hauled in his second interception in as many weeks, and McClellin made an even more athletic play to block a Justin Tucker field goal attempt:

Those were solid plays by players who add to the depth of an already-good roster, but they are not why the Patriots are 11-2.

Yet the strategy has produced big results in the past. Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers first-round pick Aqib Talib was a promising, young cornerback when he was traded to the Patriots for a swap of third-day draft picks. While he had a decent start to his career in Tampa Bay, he was in the middle of a suspension when he was traded to New England, and there were concerns about his off-field behavior.

In his first and final full season with the Patriots in 2013, Talib earned his first trip to the Pro Bowl and signed a six-year, $57 million deal with the Denver Broncos that eventually netted New England a third-round pick in the 2015 NFL draft.

It’s also part of a larger trend of the Patriots giving chances to players who seemingly blew through their opportunities elsewhere. For Albert Haynesworth, Chad Ochocinco, and many others, it didn’t result in much. But they’re low-risk moves and don’t cost New England much when they miss.

In the case of Randy Moss, acquired from the Oakland Raiders for a fourth-round pick, it produced huge results.

Expecting as much from Floyd is unfair, but it won’t cost New England much at all if the receiver’s struggles in Arizona carry to his new team. And that’s why the Patriots are more than willing to keep sifting through castoffs in their search for another reclamation project.