The Lakers made the best of what started as a bad situation earlier in the week over the weekend, winning their final two games of the season and taking advantage of the help given to them to finish as the No. 8 seed.

Certainly coming into the season, the No. 8 seed felt something much closer to worst-case scenario than a realistic one. It was evident for quite a while that things weren’t going according to plan this season, but did the Lakers make a mistake by not changing things up sooner?

That was among the handful of questions received in this week’s mailbag. Let’s dive into what you guys want to talk about.

Tot be honest, this hasn’t been a thought I had during the second half of the season, mainly because they played so well. After the trade deadline, the Lakers have had the third-ranked offense, are 12th in overall net rating and had the fifth-best win percentage in the league.

My question would be, what trade improves that?

Dejounte Murray played well after the deadline, but does he dramatically change things for the Lakers? D’Angelo Russell — who you would trade to acquire Murray — averaged 19.3 points and shot 41.3% from the 3-point line after the trade deadline. Murray only averaged three points more on higher volume and lower efficiency.

I don’t think there’s much of an argument that, this season, things play out better with Murray instead of Russell.

From there, your argument is based on players around the edges; Royce O’Neale, Dorian Finney-Smith, Tyus Jones. Are any of those players moving the needle all that much? The answer, to me, is no.

There will be a time for reflection on this season once it’s over, but injuries, more than anything else, derailed this season. Fourteen players combined to miss 262 games for the Lakers, the sixth-most man games lost due to injury in the NBA this year. Considering how few of those came from LeBron James and Anthony Davis and you see the revolving door of role players that made it hard to ever find a rhythm early in the year.

Do you know what else happened after the trade deadline this season? No injuries. The starting five remained intact and the rest of the rotation remained consistent because guys were healthy.

To sum it up, of the things the Lakers did wrong this year, opting for no trade at the deadline is not among them.

I won’t dive too deep into this because we already spent one of the mailbag pieces talking about Ham’s future. Again, this can be a topic to discuss at season’s end in greater detail.

However, I would like to present one more stat that I couldn’t last time I talked about this.

The Lakers finished the season 47-35 this season, or 48-35 if you want to include the In-Season Tournament final. Either way you slice it, since the 2010-11 season, the only other Lakers team to win more games in a season was the title-winning team in 2019-20. The 2020-21 team, to be fair, had a marginally better winning percentage — .578 to .583, to be exact — than this year’s team, but those are the only teams better than the Lakers this year.

Ham has certainly had misteps, big and small, this season. But, man, he really deserves credit for what he did with this team this year, especially given the aforementioned injury issues.

I think this is the other factor you must consider if you’re adamant Ham be fired. Who is replacing him?

Do you believe Mike Budenholzer, who Ham is a disciple of, would be a better option? Perhaps, but he’s going to have the same principles as Ham does. Terry Stotts and Kenny Atkinson were reported finalists last time, but does either move the needle that much? The list of experienced coaches available is small.

From there, are you trusting another first-time NBA head coach? Phil Handy is definitely an option, but it’s another dice roll. Juwan Howard is a friend of LeBron’s and has been considered by the Lakers previously, but he was just fired after multiple underwhelming years at Michigan.

Ultimately, I go back to the previous point I made: Ham’s job is safe no matter what happens from here on out. What will change is how hot his seat is entering next season depending on how deep they go or how well they perform this postseason.

We’ll table the first question until we know who the Lakers are playing in the playoffs because I’m doing nothing to tempt the Basketball Gods.

As for the question of AD’s elbow jumper, I think it is as back as it’s going to be. If your hope is he returns to his bubble form, I think it’s long past accepting that the bubble was a big aberration that applied to many teams and players. Having the same shooting background and environment for three months let players get more comfortable than they ever had.

This season, AD shot 38% on shots from 14 feet out to the 3-point line, according to Cleaning the Glass. That ranks in the 56th percentile among bigs. It also is almost exactly his average percentage since joining the Lakers. This is the shooter he’s going to be and the bubble was the exception.

As for potential free agents, the Lakers aren’t going to have many avenues to add players should they keep this core together again. And even if they don’t, they probably still won’t barring some drastic changes. They committed to being a team well over the cap and unless they start offloading contracts, they won’t have anything but exceptions to work with in free agency.

So your options are limited in that regard. You’re looking at veteran’s minimum guys, basically. The realistic answer to this is that having Gabe Vincent and Jarred Vanderbilt healthy for a whole season drastically improves the perimeter defense. Max Christie, assuming he gets a bigger role, will also help.