JJ Redick, renewed by the All-Star break, bounded through the halls of the Lakers’ arena Wednesday like a rested golden retriever. His team had a week off and a clean injury report, a 30-game sprint to the finish with a chance to have its best regular-season record since its 2020 title run.

There were reasons to be excited everywhere. The 48 minutes that followed in a miserable 100-97 loss to Charlotte, though, wouldn’t provide many of them, the Lakers bad on offense for most of the night and unable to get a stop down the stretch.

“I think we played, I don’t even know, 39 to 44 minutes of pretty poor offense,” Redick said after the game. “And some of that’s to be expected. Some of it was sloppiness, some of it was poor spacing, some of it was poor execution. … The reason I’m not going to read too much into that is because I think our guys competed tonight and they played extremely hard.”

LaMelo Ball and Miles Bridges broke down the Lakers’ defense time and again in the fourth quarter, the Hornets hunting Luka Doncic and attacking a defense sorely lacking rim protection.

The Lakers missed a pair of key free throws, and while a LeBron James bailout three gave them hope, his two chances at forcing overtime from deep on the Lakers’ final possession were off the mark.

“Those last two were pretty good looks,” James said. “The first one was, obviously, much better than the second one. The second one had to be rushed a little bit. But I had good looks. We had good looks all night.”

James, who sat out the All-Star Game because of injuries, scored 16 of his 26 points in the fourth quarter, including a dunk over Mark Williams, the Lakers’ ill-fated trade target.

The Lakers’ big midseason move that wasn’t rescinded, adding Doncic in a trade for Anthony Davis, fundamentally changed the way they are going to play. And in their first game out of the break, they looked like a team hopelessly trying to figure all of that out.

The confusion, which started with five lightning-quick turnovers from Doncic, cascaded into a game of painfully unserious basketball. Austin Reaves double-dribbled in transition. Dalton Knecht airballed an open corner three. James couldn’t buy a basket after a hot start and Doncic, the prized piece that undoubtedly upped the Lakers’ ceiling, showed his floor, badly struggling in his third game with them.

What the Lakers can be — a team that can attack defenses with elite playmaking from James, Doncic and Reaves, that can scramble around the court on defense and create turnovers — shows in flashes. So did the reality of what the Lakers kind of are — a roster of players still learning one another and experiencing the inevitable growing pains even when facing one of the worst teams in the league.

“I don’t think anybody thought that it was gonna click right away,” Reaves said. “I think everybody knew that there was going to be some growing pains and trying to figure out how do you … run everything, to be honest. Luka is, you know, a one-of-a-kind player, top-three players in the league, and he’s got to be comfortable being himself because, like I said, he’s one of the best players in the world so we need him to be him. It’s just going to take, you know, couple games, couple weeks, to figure out, you know, what that best looks like.”

The pains Wednesday were so bad they resulted in the Hornets ripping off a 23-1 run during the third and fourth quarters. The Lakers, who managed to lead by 13 before that stretch, were in that position mostly because Charlotte was even worse.

The Hornets eventually found their rhythm; the Lakers really didn’t.

Doncic made just five of 18 from the field, hitting only one three in nine attempts. Reaves, who struggled nearly as much, got ejected after two technical fouls in the third quarter while the Hornets made their push. And no one could stop Ball (27 points) and Bridges (29 points) when the game got tight.

The Lakers head to Portland to play Thursday night in what would’ve been their first game out of the break had it not been for the wildfires, which led to their game against Charlotte on Jan. 9 being rescheduled for Wednesday.

“Obviously we’re going to need a little time just to adjust to everything,” Doncic said. “But I think it was fine today. I think we had some good opportunities to make shots, but we didn’t make any shots — especially me. So, it will just take a little time to get used to it.”