CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When Charles Lee addressed his first news conference as the Charlotte Hornets’ head coach Tuesday, his excitement was palpable. This, you could tell, was a man who couldn’t wait to start his first NBA head coaching job after barely missing out on a couple of those sorts of jobs before.

“Not getting across the finish line,” Lee called it.

He crossed that finish line with the Hornets, though, who in Lee hired a young NBA assistant who has already been an integral part of two NBA championship franchises (Boston and Milwaukee).

Now Lee must take the Hornets across their own finish line. But the first thing he has to do is to get the Hornets into the race.

Sixteen teams in the 30-team NBA make the playoffs every year. Teams have a better than 50% chance to do it. And yet the Hornets haven’t made that 16-team field since 2016, which ranks as the longest non-playoff streak in the NBA. Outside of the Carolinas, the Hornets are irrelevant.

Lee’s biggest job: Make the playoffs, thereby making the Hornets relevant once more.

The pattern for the past eight years for Hornets fans has been a familiar one. It starts with a bit of hope, followed by a slew of losses, followed by apathy, followed by pain. Somewhere in there each year comes the part where the Hornets’ coaches, players or front office blame their latest rash of injuries for their predicament, as if this isn’t a completely predictable part of NBA basketball every year.

The Hornets’ fan base is actually better than any team with that long of a postseason drought has much of a right to expect. The team routinely draws a higher percentage of Hornets fans to Spectrum Center than, say, the Carolina Panthers do to Bank of America Stadium (where opposing fan takeovers in the fall pop up like dandelions in the summer).

Still, Hornets fans deserve better. And Lee has a chance to make them better.

On Tuesday, Lee sounded like a careful optimist, which is what a coach in his position should be. He’s made it to the NBA head coach pinnacle before he turned 40 (he’s 39, with a wife and three daughters). Now he just has to win to stay there.

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