EL SEGUNDO — The way things project now, it’s more than likely that the Lakers will find their season boiling down to a single game.

It might be a helpful way of thinking about Wednesday night’s game against the Utah Jazz, their last game before the All-Star break.

The stakes aren’t nearly as high, and once the Lakers (26-31) return from the break, they’ll still have 24 games left. But they’ve lost three straight and seven of their last nine, and they’re a squad sorely in need of some success after a topsy-turvy trade deadline that seemed primed for roster upheaval – until it wasn’t.

They view their 117-115 loss to Golden State on Saturday night as progress. Kind of. LeBron James gave a pained chuckle when thinking back to the game against the second-place team in the Western Conference, which he thought was one of the Lakers’ best efforts lately, yet one in which he shot 1 for 10 in the fourth quarter and missed a critical free throw.

“It’s unfortunate that I probably had one of the worst fourth quarters that I’ve had shooting during the time we were the most connected,” he said. “But I definitely felt the energy. The energy was just great. I thought we were connected throughout the whole game.”

The issue, however, isn’t that the Lakers haven’t shown greatness – it’s that they’ve struggled to show it consistently. James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook have only played in 19 games together this season, and even within that subset (the Lakers are 10-9), they’ve often struggled to draw three great performances on the same night. The same is true of the supporting cast, which was a potent part of the attack against Golden State but struggled to bring much oomph in losses to Portland and Milwaukee last week.

Coach Frank Vogel acknowledged that this bedeviling inconsistency is a big reason why he’s still tweaking the starting lineup: The Lakers have started 28 different lineups, with no particular group starting more than five games.

“We haven’t won consistently; I don’t know how many times we’ve won more than three in a row this year,” Vogel said. “When you have the roster makeup you have with three max (contract) guys and mostly minimum (salary) guys the rest of the way, somebody has to emerge from being locked into that starting group. I would have done it the first week of the season and stayed with it if we had gotten some traction with the lineup. We have not. So we’re still seeking.”

Even for this final game before a nine-day layoff, the Lakers don’t find themselves whole: veteran forward Carmelo Anthony, who has missed each of the last three games since straining his right hamstring, is out as a precaution, and guard Avery Bradley, who has started 42 games, is out with right knee swelling.

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One of the Lakers’ best wins in the past month came against Utah, in a game that is best remembered for Westbrook dunking over the top of towering center Rudy Gobert. But after that game came friction and tension, as well as James’ knee injury, which he admitted he’s still nursing with constant treatment. Meanwhile, the Jazz have seemingly recovered from their midseason doldrums, winning their last six games. Facing Utah before the break gives the Lakers a dose of what the last 24 games will be like, when they have the NBA’s second-toughest remaining schedule (.543 opponent winning percentage).

But extra practice days since the loss to the Warriors might help their sense of organization, both James and Vogel said. The Lakers have run through how they want to be organized on offense and how they can build their defensive habits. James and Davis have both acknowledged that there’s a sense of finality to the roster – after much speculation before the trade deadline – that adds to the team’s determination to finally jell after so much strife.

They can only take one step before the All-Star break toward the team they still think they can be. But only by taking that step forward can the Lakers finally start to pull out of their latest rough patch.

“We want to go into the break on a positive note,” Vogel said. “We felt like we played well enough to win against Golden State, but it didn’t go our way. So just focusing on getting one win.”