These aren’t cheap thoughts about what kind of car he’s driving or a dunk he missed. “You’ve got to ask yourself the question ‘Why do you live?’ ” he explained on a recent morning. “Why are you doing this stuff? Why are you waking up in the morning? That’s what you’ve got to ask. … You need to have a purpose in your life.”

I’ve read thousand-page novels that attempt to answer those questions, which don’t ever go away. But there are also simpler questions that require a bit less thought, such as this one: What the existential hell has gotten into Gortat over the past two weeks? How can you explain the past five Wizards games — all wins — in which he has averaged 17 points and 10 rebounds while shooting a modest 81 percent from the field?

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“What’s going right for me? I’m having the ball in my hands; that’s what’s going right lately,” he said, and grinned. “When you’ve got the ball in your hands, everything can happen. You’re definitely more involved — and I feel more involved, and I feel more needed.”

More needed? He’s the center on one of the best starting units in the league, the East’s hottest team, a Gee Wiz gang that now has won 16 straight at home. He’s putting up a rare body of work for any Washington big man in the franchise’s history. His coach is praising him, and his teammates are feeding him. Of course he’s needed, right?

“They don’t need centers anymore in this league,” Gortat went on. “People go small; people go five small guys on the court, five shooters. They just keep moving the ball, and whoever is open is shooting the ball. So I’m glad that we’re still trying to play at least one man inside and be able to involve the big man in the game. I still believe that my skill set are correct and good for this team. …

“I’m bringing to the table way more than just setting screens and rebounding and rim-running,” he said. “If I want to do [just] that, let me know. I can just lift weights and don’t work on my game and don’t shoot the ball anymore. If I’m not shooting in the game, why would I shoot in practice? But like I said, the team is getting people involved, Coach is telling me about giving me some touches, so I’m really grateful for that. And obviously I’m trying to pay it off.”

Yeah, no worries on that score. Not with Gortat having the seventh-best effective field goal percentage in the league while still fulfilling his muscle-bound duties. On a team overflowing with offensive options, Gortat is averaging his fewest field goal attempts in six years, but he’s still proud of his traditional big-man game, “taking shots that I took a million times.” So the Wizards have started several recent games by giving their Polish Machine a few post-up chances, something Coach Scott Brooks described as a mixture of strategy and appeasement.

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“He’s pretty forceful,” Brooks quipped. “He wants the post-ups.”

But he’s also doing major grunt work for a team that revolves around its guards. Gortat averages 6.9 “screen assists” per game, according to NBA.com, easily the highest mark in the league. Brooks this week described Gortat as the biggest surprise since his arrival in Washington. “I knew he was good, but I didn’t think he was this good,” the coach said after ticking off more subtle contributions, the screens and the offensive wisdom. Don’t think Gortat didn’t hear. (He retweeted the coach’s comments.)

“To be honest with you, this is one of the biggest compliments I’ve heard this year — and probably the past two or three years,” Gortat said. “Nobody ever described me that way. I never have people talking about me on ESPN or TNT, because that’s just how it is. People don’t talk about centers anymore, unless you drop 30 a night. So that’s a huge compliment, and obviously it’s a great feeling that people see that — especially your boss.”

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The 2013 trade that brought Gortat to D.C. sent two assets to Phoenix: Emeka Okafor, who never played again, and a draft pick that became the little-used Tyler Ennis. Gortat, meanwhile, is on his way to a fifth straight season of averaging at least 11 points and 8 rebounds. He’ll join Elvin Hayes, Antawn Jamison and Jeff Ruland as the only men to do that since this franchise moved to Washington.

Now back to that whole purpose thing. Gortat’s thought plenty about his tangible goals when he sits down to contemplate life. He wanted to make a lot of money, “but I did make a lot of money in my life, so I already passed that point a long time ago,” he said. He wants a great family, with a son. He wants to be remembered as one of the best basketball players, or maybe the best, in Poland’s history. And he wants to be remembered as a great citizen of his country.

People in NBA circles, he said, often don’t know much about Poland. Some assume it’s a third-world country. “They don’t even think that we have the wheel in Poland, probably,” he said. So that search for purpose finds expression in his annual Polish Heritage Night at Verizon Center, a substantial undertaking that will be held Saturday night.

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This year’s event will again feature Polish celebrities; actress Alicja Bachleda, golfer Adrian Meronk, mixed martial arts star Joanna Jędrzejczyk, whom Gortat called “a brutal princess.” And it will also feature Polish military veterans, plus Natalia Ambrozinska, a widowed military wife who joined the Polish armed forces herself after her husband’s death and who was brought with her family on a U.S. vacation by Gortat’s foundation. There’s a Friday night kickoff event with the Polish ambassador and a video message from Polish President Andrzej Duda, and these things are as important to Gortat as his scoring average.

“Again, you think about goals, and about the future,” Gortat said. “And I definitely want to be involved in my country. I definitely want to be involved in being one of the ambassadors of the country. And I feel responsible for taking care of my [expat] community — not only here, but in the entire United States.”

Life without a grander purpose? “That’s miserable,” Gortat said, and he thinks he knows what his is.