I agree that the build up of injuries took a lot of wind out of their sails. The Lonzo injury has been especially big in hindsight

It's hard to say what's fair in terms of injuries because it's pretty rare for a team to go completely unscathed. But hypothetically in Zo and LeBron were both healthy, I think they would be in contention for the 7/8 seed. If they kept up the same pace as their 20-14 start without a LeBron injury, they go 11-7 or 10-8 instead of 6-12. That's a 4-5 game bump. Then if they went 8-5 instead of 4-9 in their most recent stretch, that's a difference of 8 or 9 wins. That puts them in 7th.

Obviously this is just hypotheticals but I think that they're neither a lottery team they are now nor the 4th seed they were near the halfway point. Although I do think they'd be worse than those projections if Zo still got injured, and many teams have had injuries to players of Lonzo's level. The big argument I've been seeing is specifically about LeBron's injury because nobody else has lost a similar caliber of player, but that doesn't mean we should dismiss all their health issues and assume that they would normally be at full strength.