Is Kyle Kuzma a leader? The Wizards will need to find out.

Day one and already the old man — ahem, 28-year-old forward with dyed blue hair — needed pain relief? Maybe he’s worn down from the weight of his new four-year, $102 million contract he signed this summer. Or maybe after the franchise’s overhaul that included the trade of Bradley Beal in an effort to start an earnest rebuild, with Kuzma emerging as the team’s most marketable asset, this new duty has been a heavy lift. Or maybe it was something else.

“Year 7!” Kuzma responded, when teased about the bags of ice.

Six long years as an NBA player and, yes, you too might feel inflammation ahead of media day. But it’s the experience of being around the league for a long time — not the size of a player’s contract, nor his star power — that will best serve the 2023-24 Wizards.

As long as Washington and its new executive team attempt to solve the franchise’s inferiority stalemate, the Wizards can also help themselves by abandoning a common yet misguided instinct: anointing the guy who makes the most money as the team leader.

They’ve tried that often around here. Bankrolling the best player and expecting him to lead in the locker room and on the court. But in nearly a decade of majority owner Ted Leonsis handing maximum contracts to the likes of Beal, John Wall and even Otto Porter Jr., the final results have disappointed. (That trio of homegrown talent produced exciting moments, for sure, but when viewing their career arcs with the benefit of time and distance, none truly seemed like natural leaders.) Over the span of the trio’s time here, the Wizards have either dropped off in the second round of the playoffs, or missed the postseason without being bad enough to get a franchise-altering draft pick. Now, the franchise finds itself in extermination mode, clearing away many of the traces left from the former regime and having to start over.

Reshuffle … restart … remix … retool. Whatever the Wizards’ brass want to call this season, and however long it lasts, this is a classic teardown and rebuild. You know it’s going to be a rough one when the president of basketball operations essentially says the year will be about the wins seen in player development and not the Ws on the court. “We’re going to have streaks. We’re going to have ebbs and flows throughout the course of the season,” Michael Winger told reporters before the start of training camp. “There’s no evaluation on that kind of thing.”

With that patient approach to developing players, the locker room’s newest leader should emerge in the same manner. Organically, and over…