You think it’s bad being a Knicks fan, bemoaning your team’s consecutive trips to the lottery? Try rooting for the Golden State Warriors some time.

In what has become one of the rites of spring, the Warriors’ brass is once again busily making plans to visit Secaucus in May. Barring a miracle in the season’s final three weeks, this will be their 12th straight trip to the lottery, which is easily the longest playoff drought in the NBA. In most of those years they haven’t even come close – in those 12 seasons, they’ve finished within five games of the final playoff spot just twice.

Statistically, this is quite a feat. For 10 of the 12 seasons, the Warriors were one of only 14 teams in the Western Conference, meaning that each team had a 57% chance of making it. Overall, the odds tell us that there’s only a 0.18% chance of a team missing the playoffs for 12 straight seasons – about a one-in-500 chance.

That’s bad enough for Warriors fans (of which there are a surprising large number), but there’s an added level of disappointment because this was the year the streak was supposed to end. With last spring’s acquisition of Baron Davis and the development of several young players, the Warriors seemed to match the talent level of several of their counterparts in the Western Conference. Certainly the backcourt of Davis and Jason Richardson ranked among the league’s elite, and there seemed to be enough good players up and down the roster to get the Warriors to the 42 or so wins they’d need to make the postseason.

Obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way. Monday night’s disappointing 116-98 home loss to the Wizards dropped Golden State to 30-39 on the season. Trailing Sacramento by four games for the West’s final playoff spot, the club pretty much needs to run the table in order to make the playoffs.

The Warriors began the year with an encouraging 12-6 start, but since then they’ve been mired in an 18-33 malaise that has locked them in the Pacific Division cellar. Part of the problem has been that their luck evened out. Golden State’s fast start was attributable mainly to some unusually poor 3-point shooting by its opponents, and one had to figure that would even out over time. It has – Golden State’s 3-point defense remains better than the league average (35.0% to 36.5%), but it’s a far cry from the 29.5% shooting it permitted in the first 18 games.

But defense hasn’t really been the problem. The Warriors are basically an average defensive team – they rank 18th overall in Defensive Efficiency, my rating of a team’s points allowed per 100 possessions. That’s a decent performance considering the Warriors are a guard-oriented team without a great stopper on the perimeter and appear an inch or two short in the paint. This team isn’t supposed to win with defense.

Instead, their downfall has been an extremely disappointing lack of offensive production. The Warriors entered the year expecting to be among the league’s better offensive teams. But they rank a mere 20th in Offensive Efficiency, barely ahead of the 22nd-ranked Knicks, despite Richardson having the best season of his career. Even with his individual brilliance, though, the results aren’t adding up.

Taking a statistical look at Golden State’s failure, a few things jump out. The first is an over-reliance on the 3-point shot. The Warriors are second in the NBA in 3-pointers per field-goal attempt, taking 27.1% of their shots from beyond the arc. Only Phoenix tries more long-range bombs, and not by much.

But here’s the thing: The Warriors aren’t good at 3-pointers. They shoot 34.4% from downtown, well below the league average of 36.0%. So they’re focusing a big chunk of their shot attempts on an area where they’re not particularly good. The main culprit here is Davis. A devastating penetrator and open-court player who ranks second in the league in assists, he nonetheless has done massive harm to the offense with his insistence on chucking ill-chosen 3-pointers early in the shot clock. Davis has been a poor 3-point shooter his entire career, shooting 32.7% for this career and 31.6% on the season. Yet he’s trying an average of six of them per game.

But Davis isn’t the only culprit; this team is full of terrible foul shooters. Golden State ranks 29th in free-throw percentage at 71.6%, ahead of only Miami. This costs the team about one point per game. That may not seem like much, but it can be huge in terms of the thin margin that separates the playoffs from the lottery in the West – a difference of one point per game, on average, results in nearly three more wins.

Again, the culprits are obvious. The Warriors’ top two scorers, Richardson and Davis, shoot 66.6% and 67.5% respectively from the line, while backup center Andris Biedrins isn’t helping any with his 30.4% mark. (For those who haven’t seen Biedrins yet, you seriously need to watch this guy shoot free throws. He makes Chris Dudley look like Larry Bird.)

Those are issues, especially if coach Mike Montgomery can’t restrain Davis’s rampant gunning. But there’s a more severe problem holding the team back: the supporting cast just isn’t good enough. The next-best player after Richardson and Davis is probably power forward Troy Murphy. He’s a decent, workmanlike player having one of his better seasons, but if you ranked the third-best player on every NBA team, Murphy would certainly be near the bottom.

After Murphy, the Warriors were hoping for big production from small forwards Mike Dunleavy and Michael Pietrus. Both are former no. 1 picks who have had horribly disappointing seasons. In terms of Player Efficiency Rating (PER, my per-minute rating of a player’s statistical production), both Dunleavy (12.3) and Pietrus (10.5) rank well below the league average of 15.0. In fact, Davis, Richardson, and Murphy are the only three Warrior regulars above 15.0, and they end up playing 3-on-5 at the offensive end on many nights.

What I’m saying, in a nutshell, is that without a major facelift, the streak of futility seems likely to hit 13 a year from now. Yes, the Warriors have some intriguing young players. Teenagers Biedrins and Monta Ellis and first-round pick Ike Diogu all could be very good in a few years, and maybe Pietrus will snap out of his funk next year as well.

But in the short term, it’s hard to see things improving much. While Montgomery is taking most of the heat, firing him won’t cure the Warriors’ essential problem: They were built to be an offensive team, and they can’t score. Unless that goes away, neither will the streak.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com.