So what’s up with Whiteside?

MIAMI — This was supposed to be the season when the Miami Heat were going to figure it out with Hassan Whiteside, mostly because that’s what Heat President Pat Riley said a year ago.

To refresh in the wake of this just-completed season that saw Whiteside’s playing time marginalized to an average of 17.3 minutes over the season’s final 19 games, this was Riley on April 30, 2018:

“There has to be an intervention and I’m going to be the intervener. That’s real . ... The disconnect between he and Spo, that’s going to take a discussion between them and its going to take thought on the part of Coach and also Hassan.”

As in getting Whiteside and coach Erik Spoelstra on the same page when it came to the center the Heat signed to a four-year, $98 million contract on July 1, 2016.

Then there was Riley two months later, on June 21, the night of the 2018 NBA draft, dismissing the need for such a formal summit.

“Whatever happened then was two months ago,” Riley said at the time. “You move on and you make the

best of it. I think that’s where we are right now.”

And then came Riley this past weekend at AmericanAirlines Arena, when asked about Whiteside not only being removed from the starting lineup for the final 20 games of the season but also being utilized for only 14 total minutes this season alongside emerging big man Bam Adebayo, the 2017 firstround pick out of Kentucky.

“I think we’ll have a discussion about that — we already have talked about it,” Riley said of his seasonending interaction with Spoelstra.

Riley then offered a detailed explanation of how the NBA has changed over the years, making it more complex to align big men in the same lineup, ending that comment with an offer to further broach the subject with Spoelstra.

“I can give him some help on it because I have a background in coaching,” Riley said.

Whiteside took the high road over the close of the season but stressed he wanted to play more and believed he should have played more. While he declined comment following his season-ending meeting with Spoelstra, there were numerous raw statistics that made a case in his favor.

In averaging the same 23.3 minutes per game as Adebayo this season, Whiteside averaged 12.3 points to 8.9, 11.3 rebounds to 7.3 and 1.89 blocked shots to 0.79. Adebayo averaged 2.2 assists to Whiteside’s 0.8, but he also committed 1.5 turnovers to Whiteside’s 1.3.

As he did at the close of the 2017-18 season, Spoelstra offered his familiar refrain that going forward, “I’m open to anything.”

“Every offseason, we will look under the hood and evaluate, A through Z,” he said. “This year, the way our team was set up, we had a lot of the guys that can move the needle at our frontcourt positions. And then Bam was able to emerge from that.”

As he did a year ago, Spoelstra pushed aside the notion of a disconnect.

“I think where Hassan is right now is where he has been,” he said. “We value him a great deal. He anchors our defense.

“I know it’s easy to say that he finished the season on the bench, and you can look at this season as something where he took a step back. I know he would like to play more, and every player should feel that way.”

There was a moment during the final week of the season when Whiteside and Adebayo were on the court together briefly against the Timberwolves.

“I was like, here we go!” forward Josh Richardson said.

But Whiteside and Adebayo wound up playing only four seconds together that night. Instead, Adebayo and Kelly Olynyk rolled through the remainder of the season as the starting power rotation.

“The two of them, for whatever reason, you put them on the floor together and that unit functions at another level,” Spoelstra said. “We really figured it out on another level.”

So again the Heat are left with another offseason to figure out what’s next with Whiteside.