The injuries hurt, but I feel like blaming the loss on them is sort of making excuses in this particular case. Brees had been playing injured, plus we had already been without Thomas and Harris for a while.
There is a huge difference between regular season and playoffs. As we all saw, "good enough to win games in the regular season" did not translate into playoff wins when it mattered. But we'll never know "what if" because all those injuries did happen. Also none of us knew the extent of both Drew and MT's injuries, which were only revealed after the loss. I think those injuries affected the game plan and the outcome, but who really knows