The Lakers played their final game of the 2021-22 season. Now comes the hard part.

They finished 11th in the Western Conference amid a season gone awry for a variety of reasons — bad defense, erratic shooting and too many injuries to too many key players.

The team that was the second choice to win it all before the season finished with a numbingly poor 33-49 record. The questions began almost immediately after a 146-141 overtime victory Sunday against the Denver Nuggets.

First and foremost, will Coach Frank Vogel be back for a fourth season with the Lakers? The answer could come as soon as Monday for a coach with one more year left on his contract.

“We’ll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow,” Vogel said Sunday night when asked about an ESPN report indicating he would be fired Monday. “I’m going to enjoy tonight’s game and what our guys did tonight.”

Coaching aside, there will be lineup questions for the front office to consider throughout the off-season. The Lakers don’t have a first-round pick in the June draft because of the Anthony Davis trade in 2018. They also don’t have a second-round pick.

They won’t have much purchasing power in free agency in July, their main spending tool likely limited to a “mini mid-level exception” worth about $6 million for a player next season. They’ll have to again fill out most of their roster with minimum-salaried players.

Five players are under contract with the Lakers next season: LeBron James ($44.5 million), Davis ($38 million), Talen Horton-Tucker ($10.3 million), Wenyen Gabriel ($1.8 million) and Austin Reaves ($1.6 million).

Two other players are expected to exercise player options by late June: Russell Westbrook ($47 million) and Kendrick Nunn ($5.3 million).

Rob Pelinka, the Lakers’ vice president of basketball operations, is expected to address the media Monday after one of the most disappointing seasons in team history.

To start, injuries crushed the Lakers. Davis played 40 games because of separate knee and foot injuries. It marked the second time in as many seasons where he missed half the Lakers’ games.

James was a delight on the court and played nothing like a player at age 37. But he missed 26 games, almost one-third of the season, because of abdominal, knee and ankle injuries.

Nunn, the Lakers’ main free agent acquisition last summer, did not play one game because of a bone bruise on his knee.

Even when the Lakers were healthy, they didn’t display the stingy defense shown by most of Vogel’s teams. They slipped from the third-best defensive rating two years ago in their championship season to 21st in the league before Sunday’s game.

Their offense struggled too. Notably, the Lakers were a dismal 22nd in the league from three-point range before Sunday, another issue that plagued them in recent seasons.

Only one rotation player shot better than 39% behind the arc and it was late-season acquisition D.J. Augustin. Westbrook shot 29.8% from deep, Horton-Tucker was only 27.4% and Davis was a mere 18.6% behind the arc.

Westbrook, 33, never quite seemed comfortable in his first season with the Lakers. He had trouble finding his way in the Lakers’ offense, though he played better over the final few weeks of the season. He averaged only 18.5 points, his lowest since 2010.

Sunday’s victory over the Nuggets gave the Lakers their first two-game winning streak since Jan. 7. It was punctuated by 41 points from Malik Monk and a surreal breakout by Reaves, who had 31 points, 16 rebounds and 10 assists. He became only the fourth rookie in NBA history with at least 30 points, 15 rebounds and 10 assists in a game, joining Blake Griffin, Oscar Robertson and Jerry West.

“It feels amazing,” Reaves told Spectrum SportsNet. “At the end of the day, it’s just basketball. It hasn’t been the year we wanted it to be, but things happen. You learn from them, you move on and you get better.”

But there were many more low points than shining moments. The Lakers failed to even make the play-in tournament for the Western Conference.

Some of their losses were true head-scratchers to subpar teams — Indiana, Sacramento, Houston, Portland and two separate losses after taking large leads against Oklahoma City.

Their most damaging setback came two weeks ago in New Orleans, where a 23-point lead turned into an eight-point loss as missing the playoffs became a legitimate concern.

Perhaps veteran Carmelo Anthony said it best.

“There was good days. There was bad days,” he said Sunday. “But we got through it.”