Greg Cote: After Heat's lost season, an urgent summer will be Pat Riley's epilogue to write

MIAMI — Pat Riley turned 80 years old Thursday. Happy birthday, Pat! Or not, perhaps.

Personal policy: I never use the word “disaster” in describing anything in sports. There are too many of those for real, natural and man-made, to think anything merits the description where games are being played.

So let’s just call this Miami Heat season a long-smoldering dumpster fire and a new nadir for coach Erik Spoelstra, who all but admits that he has tried everything, nothing is working, and he has no answers. The season also forces a new reflection point upon the club president Riley, who at this stage of his life and career must summon all of his misplaced mojo for one last run at a magical offseason, a whale, an elusive fourth championship parade down Biscayne Boulevard.

Jimmy Butler had his moments here (mostly in the playoffs), but was never the superstar of a stature to carry this team as its best player to an NBA title. Likewise, Tyler Herro and Bam Adebayo, individually or in tandem, are not that guy now.

Miami needs an elite star such as Kevin Durant, who Phoenix appears willing to trade this summer. I would want Durant, even at age 36, were I Riley. I would love to pair him with Bam and Herro and ideally part with others and draft picks to get him. Riley has tried and failed twice before to acquire Durant and, with both their ages in mind, this looks like the last chance.

Doesn’t have to be Durant. Point is, the Heat need a shakeup, a major get, a roster where Bam and Herro are not your best players.

The Heat across their 37 seasons have been the most relentlessly consistent winning franchise we have had in South Florida sports. It is in this context that a 29-40 record dragged by a current nine-game losing skid feels especially bad. Because from this club, we expect more. Assume more, demand more.

Coming just two years after reaching the NBA Finals, this is Miami’s second-worst season since Dwyane Wade arrived in 2003-04.

That this Heat team will almost certainly somehow still end up in the playoffs, technically, certainly would feather any argument against the NBA’s four-team play-in round. Is this a postseason-deserving team? Or just one lucky that Toronto is even worse?

But there is precedent for this season, as there is precedent for most everything.

The only poorer record since Wade arrived was a league-worst 15-67 tailspin in 2007-08 — just two years after Miami’s first championship.

Three years later the Heat landed LeBron James and four straight Finals with two more championships followed.

Everything that could go wrong did in that 15-67 year, Riley’s last as head coach. Alonzo Mourning had a season-ending knee injury. Shaquille O’Neal was traded at midseason. Wade missed more than 20 games with a knee injury. The team was 6-35 on the road. Riley had no answers.

The current team also has had its share of injuries but of course the season will be remembered for the Butler mess. The aging star’s departure here was as messy as it has been at his other career stops. The relationship soured, he pouted, quit on the team, and after three club suspensions there was no choice but to trade him and least get something in return

The proverbial salt in the wound: Butler, joyful again, has Golden State swooning over him. The Warriors are 15-2 with him starting, and Butler, always the alpha dog in Miami, has had no problem shelving his ego and curtsying to the idea he’s playing on Steph Curry’s team now.

The Heat host Golden State and Butler next Tuesday. It should be gruesome and delicious.

Miami’s current team’s nine-game losing streak is the club’s worst since that team lost 11 in a row in ‘08.

“There’s not much to be said,” said Herro after the ninth straight defeat, a last-second heartbreaker at home to Detroit.

The Pistons had been a betting underdog to Miami in 20 straight games, until Wednesday night. The Heat have now blown a double-digit lead in 19 of their losses and a fourth-quarter lead in 17. Something is missing from the collective DNA. Can you order killer-instinct from Amazon for next-day delivery?

Bam and Herro combined for 59 points Wednesday night. Still not enough.

“The only thing we have to do now is you just stay the course. You stay with it,” Spoelstra said. “There’s no way to explain some of this. You just have to find more resolve. We’re all getting tested in so many different ways that we do not want to get tested, but there can be a beauty in these challenges and these tests if we just continue to stay stubborn.”

As a nitpick, I would suggest a team on a nine-game losing streak perhaps not stay the course but rather chart a new. This team’s talent is better than its record. Has it underachieved? Quite obviously. Then again Spoelstra has shuffled in 22 different starting lineups. He’s trying everything. He hasn’t stopped being one of the NBA’s premier head coaches.

And, hey, give the coach credit who can say in the midst of such a season that “there can be a beauty in these challenges.” It’s a whole new level of positive spin.

This season will be over before long, and it will be a merciful end.

The summer that follows will see an urgency for change, a new direction. It will be a referendum of sorts on Pat Riley, an epilogue that will be his to write.