Should you choose to read Jeff Benedict’s book “Out of Bounds: Inside The NBA’s Culture of Rape, Violence, and Crime” (Harper Collins, $24.95), you will never look at pro basketball players quite the same.

And that’s probably good.

Through tireless research and painstaking reporting, Benedict examines a league whose players are, in his words, “adolescents who are excessively paid and over-hyped to play a boy’s game while living in a cocoon where they are pampered, protected and never told no.”

This is not a revelation, just a 221-page reminder.

And a jarring reminder, at that.

We are forced to look beyond the league’s glitzy I-Love-This-Game facade and come to grips with the fact that too many players are far less heroic than we believe them to be. That too often they have an outsized sense of entitlement and an undersized sense of accountability, one fostered by an army of handlers — agents, lawyers, public-relations types, et al. — who eradicate trouble whenever it arises.

Benedict devotes much of his book to the troubles of journeymen Ruben Patterson and Sam Mack. But he also mentions bigger names who have negotiated the legal gauntlet, touches on the ongoing Kobe Bryant case and presents in detail the domestic battery case involving current Sixers forward Glenn Robinson.

Benedict also reports on the results of his criminal background check of the 417 non-foreign-born players on NBA rosters during the 2001-02 season. Law-enforcement agencies complied with 177 of his requests for information, revealing that 71 players had been charged with serious crimes, defined by the author as “felonies or a misdemeanor involving violence, weapons, drugs, destruction or theft of property, or altercations with law-enforcement officials.”

That’s 40 percent. Even if the study was not complete, the conclusion is troubling — especially when contrasted with a similar examination Benedict did of the NFL with Don Yaeger for the 1998 book “Pros and Cons.” They found that 21 percent of that league’s players had been charged with a serious crime.

The anecdotes are even more powerful than the statistics. Benedict writes that early on July 19, 2002, Robinson — then with the Milwaukee Bucks — attacked his fiancee at the time, Jonta French, inside a home he owns in Chicago Heights, Ill.

Found guilty of domestic battery and assault in May 2003, Robinson was sentenced to one year of probation, five days of community service and ordered to complete an anger-management program.

If the book has a weakness, it is that Benedict does not offer a suitable solution to the NBA’s problems; the best he can come up with is collegiate reform and re-examination.

It is nonetheless a worthwhile read, and one more reminder that our heroes often aren’t all they are cracked up to be.

It’s always good to keep that in mind.