What the objective of the whirlpool is to clump all the solids together in the middle to form a nice tight trub cone for when racking from kettle into fermentor also a way to keep hops moving in the wort increasing contact time and hopefully flavour extraction into the wort. I'd imagine if you had a bag of hops suspended in the wort it will flow through the hops extracting all the goodies but itll probably slow the whirlpool down some.