WASHINGTON — The Wizards face an existential choice in the next few weeks. Actually, this is a good thing.

Washington, sooner than it likely wants, is nearing a crossroads in its rebuild. The Wizards’ young players — Alex Sarr and Kyshawn George, in particular, and Tre Johnson and Bub Carrington, of late — are starting to do things more consistently that actually win basketball games, including four of the team’s last eight contests. But their improvement runs at cross-purposes to what the Wizards, as a franchise, need for the next 50 or so games.

The organization needs more losses, and lots of them, to have the best chance at an optimal result in next May’s NBA Draft Lottery, the pathway to multiple players with transformational talent who will be at the top of next June’s draft.

And to get one of those players, Washington needs to keep its 2026 first-round pick.

As long as the Wizards stay in the bottom eight this season, they’ll keep the pick and potentially get a shot at A.J. Dybantsa or Darryn Peterson or Cameron Boozer, each of whom would dramatically raise the team’s ceiling — and, not tangentially, open the wallets of potential ticket and suite buyers, as Ted Leonsis and the city ratchet up the multi-year, $800 million renovation of Capital One Arena. Getting Kingston Flemings from Houston or Mikel Brown Jr., from Louisville, both crazy talented point guards, wouldn’t be a terrible outcome, either.

But if the Wizards finish higher than eighth, the pick would go to the New York Knicks, the final result of multiple multi-team trades over the years, beginning with Washington’s deal with Houston in 2020 that sent John Wall and a future first-rounder to the Rockets for Russell Westbrook.

A franchise player doesn’t have to come at the top of the draft — the Suns, in town Monday, have been a Devin Booker-centric squad since Phoenix took him 13th in 2015. But the chances remain far greater to find a superstar in the top 3-5 picks of the first round, rather than at the end of the lottery.

Wizards fans are now lamenting the possibility of missing out, again, on a franchise-level player. Sotto voce, so do many in the building. There is having greatness and not having it, and Washington’s been in the latter category, with few exceptions, for the last five decades. The best path to winning big is to lose big, one last time, and get The Guy.

“Yeah, we hear that, but we’re not worried about it, for real,” Bilal Coulibaly said Monday after the Wizards’ 115-101 loss to the Suns. “We get out there, and we’re trying to hoop. Everybody that’s on the court, they’re not trying to do the wrong things. Everybody’s trying to do the right thing. So, we’re not worried about that. We just get out there and hoop.”

The obvious move would be to trade or otherwise separate from veterans such as CJ McCollum and Khris Middleton before February’s trade deadline, then gradually reduce the minutes of as many of the young core as possible after the All-Star break. (Can you prove that someone doesn’t have knee tendinitis?) That’s easier when there are no signs of hope, and few are paying attention.

But Washington’s beaten Memphis twice this month, and Toronto, and Milwaukee, along with the rebuilding Pacers, following a win just after Thanksgiving over the Hawks — the Wizards’ first-ever win in the NBA Cup In-Season Tournament. None of those teams is anything approaching great, to be sure. But the Wizards aren’t just beating fellow tankers anymore. And it’s hard to turn off the tap once competitive people get a taste of winning.

That this comes as the NBA is, again, making clear to its teams that it’s getting weary of teams camping indefinitely in the lottery, only raises the stakes.

The Wizards aren’t alone in this predicament. After starting 3-16, Brooklyn’s won seven of its last 11 games, including wins over Minnesota, Philadelphia, Toronto and Chicago, with Michael Porter Jr. making an All-Star run, averaging 25.8 points per game and shooting 41 percent from deep.

Utah’s trying to live up to the preseason words of its new president of basketball operations, Austin Ainge, who said the Jazz were done tanking — even though the Jazz, too, will surrender their 2026 first (to the Oklahoma City Thunder, naturally) if it’s not in the top eight of the first round. The Clippers have awakened from their coma with a recent winning streak.

To teams currently at the top of the heap, finding hope amid such mediocrity must sound ludicrous. But it wasn’t that long ago that the now-champion Thunder sent a healthy Al Horford home with 28 games left in the 2020-21 season, and an emerging Shai Gilgeous-Alexander missed action due to a torn plantar fascia, giving their fans a heaping helping of Aleksej “Poku” Pokuševski instead.

Leonsis finally green-lit a full rebuild in 2023 with the hiring of Michael Winger as president of Monumental Basketball and Will Dawkins as general manager. Winger and Dawkins have taken the team down to the studs, hired an army of development coaches and performance analysts, built out the analytics department and leveled up the team’s facilities — most notably at Cap One — including a massive expansion of the home team’s locker and family rooms.

The braintrust was adamant that it was going to throw its young guys out there and keep them out there. Force-feeding minutes, the front office believed and believes, is the quickest way to get young players to improve. That belief is, slowly, coming to fruition.

Sarr, who is in his second NBA season, ranks second in the league in blocked shots per game, at 2.2, and is just outside the top 20 in rebounds per game (8.0).

“That’s why he’s here. That’s why we drafted him: to anchor our defense,” coach Brian Keefe said Sunday.

Sarr has also significantly improved his field goal percentage, from .394 last season to .505 so far this season, in large part because of a much different shot diet, with far fewer 3-point attempts, and much more activity in the paint and at the rim. He’s also ninth in the league among all players in year-over-year improvement in the Offensive LEBRON advanced metric, per the website bball-index.com.

The year-plus of minutes for Sarr, night after night, is starting to pay off. He’s starting to recognize what he’s seeing on the floor.

“I think it made me a lot better,” Sarr said Sunday, after blocking a career-high six shots in the Wizards’ win over Memphis. “Just the fact that I was out there a lot my rookie year, getting a lot of minutes, seeing a lot of different coverages, making mistakes and being able to play through them. And I still make mistakes. But just going back, watching film, having coaches, teammates that hold me accountable, and me knowing what I can do better, I feel that just allows me to do what I can do to get better.”

Sarr held his own Sunday against Grizzlies center Jaren Jackson Jr., a two-time All-Star, the 2023 Defensive Player of the Year and a three-time all-NBA Defensive first-team selection. Jackson led Memphis with 31 points, but Sarr had 20 points, nine rebounds and the six blocks.

Coulibaly still struggles mightily at the offensive end, but he guarded Ja Morant much of the night and again made a star player work for his points. The Wizards didn’t shoot it particularly well, and they gave up a 19-0 run in the third quarter, but they got the win.

They won without Kyshawn George, who’s also improved significantly in his second pro season, almost doubling his scoring average to 15 points per game, up from 8.7 last season, and who’s doubled his assist averages to five per game. Johnson, the sixth pick in the ’25 draft, is shooting almost 41 percent from deep and is starting to make logo 3s with regularity, as he did Sunday and Monday.

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And while Carrington still turns the ball over way too much to be a starting point guard, he’s been splashing 3s all season. He’s 12th in the league in 3-point percentage, at .443, on decent volume (more than four attempts per game). The Wizards have benched Cam Whitmore, for now anyway, in favor of more minutes for rookies Will Riley and Jamir Watkins.

The league is just so young now.

“Today, playing hard is a necessity, it feels like,” Suns coach Jordan Ott said. “The ability to play hard is obviously easier when you’re younger; you can do it night after night. And then, just the speed factor, I think, right now in the league, everyone’s looking for speed. Everyone’s looking for defensive aggression. A lot of times, you can find that in some younger players. With that comes some bumps.”

Indeed, while their improvement is duly noted, the Wizards are still 7-24, trailing only the Pacers for the league’s worst record.

Washington’s team defense is still horrendous; the Wizards are last in the league in defensive rating, which would actually be worse than the 28th place the team finished in each of the two previous seasons. But in the last 10 games, Washington ranks 23rd. Small progress. But progress.

“We know we can be better,” Coulibaly said Monday. “We know we’re a young team. Phoenix, they’ve got vets. They’ve got guys who’ve been in the playoffs. They’ve got guys who know how to play basketball in tough times. We’ve got to learn from that. We will. We will. I know we will.”

How fast will that happen here, though, as the calendar flips to one of the most important six-month stretches in this franchise’s recent history?