LeBron James cements his status as an antihero

It's been a while since I've seen a movie in the theater. I'm thinking of catching Bad Teacher when it comes out next week, if only for the prescient sports commentary couched as comedy.

The film stars Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake (united again - awkward), and Jason Segel. Segel plays a gym teacher. Maybe you've seen the trailer, during which Segel has a heated exchange with a mouthy grade-schooler.

"There is no way LeBron will ever be Jordan," Segel says. "Call me when LeBron has six championships."

"Is that your only argument?" the pushy, prepubescent foil shouts back.

"That's the only argument I need, Shawn!" Segel replies.

It's funny because it's true - because it was true when they shot the film long before the 2011 NBA Finals, and because it remains true now.

Before the Finals - before Dirk Nowitzki completed his career-long metamorphosis from a soft player willing to hide inside his shell to a man hardened by, and seemingly impervious to, pressure - a lot of little Shawns were barking about James' basketball brilliance. It hardly mattered that there was almost no empirical evidence to rightly place James in the same discussion as Jordan and Wilt and Russell and Magic and Bird and the other one-name greats who dominated the game before James came along and so brazenly crowned himself King.

You don't hear much from the Shawns these days. They've been drowned out by an anti-LeBron din. LeBronLeBronLeBronLeBronLeBronLeBron. It is all LeBron all the time now, but none of it is positive.

Even if James eventually wins a title or two, he can no longer be theoretically placed at the top of the NBA's all-time list. He might be thought of as one of the best, but he will not be considered the best. In the process, with ill-advised tweets and fake coughs and I'm-still-me-and-you're-still-you rejoinders, he took the final steps to becoming a permanent antihero. There's no going back now. Those who continue to root for him are polemicists and little more.

That, more than a ring and a parade, is what James lost this postseason.

These Finals didn't just serve to make champions of Nowitzki and Mark Cuban and Dallas. These Finals doubled as the death of hype and the birth of reality. James, no matter how defiant, has a different and permanent image now - one that is far less flattering and mythical.

"These guys go on stage and talk about they're going to win not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six championships," Charles Barkley recently said on ESPN radio in New York. "We're sitting at home like, 'Oh, you think it's that easy, huh?' Now look where your [expletive] is at right now. You're at the bottom of the barrel, again, just like everybody else. I think you guys in the media, and I'm going to blame the media, told him he's Michael Jordan."

The Shawns and the Scotties would surely admit as much. Despite his physical stature, James has come up frightfully small in his only two Finals appearances. Maybe he can be excused for the first one. He was younger (and seemingly more humble) then, and he was forced to carry a Cleveland team of castoffs and broken bit players.

There is no pardon, however, for this year's poor performance. The best players, the elite, play better when titles are at stake. James played worse. Much worse. During the regular season, he averaged 26.7 points, 7 assists, and 7.5 rebounds per game. During the Finals, his assists and rebounds dipped slightly (6.8 and 7.2), while his scoring fell off significantly, dropping to 17.8 ppg. Even worse: When it mattered most, when the games were in their last five minutes and the score was within five points, James was 0 for 7 from the field and had no points. Forget about him being the best ever. During the Finals, he was exposed for not even being the best player on his team. James knows all that, which might be why he became so defensive after the defeat and lashed out at his critics.

"All the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today," James said. "They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do."

It was an adolescent defense mechanism (one he's since tried to recast as a misunderstood statement), but it did little to conceal the truth: He's simply one of many players in various sports who never won it all. At the moment, he isn't Jordan - he's Ken Griffey Jr. as an unchecked snob, Eric Lindros with a bigger ego, Patrick Ewing as a willing and unapologetic mercenary. He's a footnote in history, not a chapter, and the words penned about him grow uglier by the day.