DashSync

There’s a language to basketball — let’s call it NBAnglish — that’s still evolving.

To hold a fluent conversation, you must know terms such as Bird rights and trade kickers and second apron. Turn on the television: Even the chyron references midlevel exceptions and pick protections. Listen to the latest episode of your favorite podcast: They’re discussing the Derrick Rose rule and supermaxes. Go online: You’ll see tampering jokes and luxury tax breakdowns.

Advertisement

“I could have never imagined that the CBA, the salary cap, all the weird jargon would become its own subset of NBA coverage,” says Howard Beck, a longtime national reporter and president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association, currently contributing to GQ.

When Beck began his career in 1997, there was no Basketball-Reference, no analytics, no fan blogs. “You would struggle to find standings online,” he says. The league only offered a two-page explanation of the salary cap.

“The idea that fans would talk about the CBA and all of its features in the same way they talk about the 13th man on the roster,” Beck says, “is wild.”

Over the past two decades, that’s changed. The internet has provided more room for hyperspecific interests, which has, in turn, bled back into the league’s broader coverage and the fandom around it.

“It used to be that people came to the game, hoped their team won and went home sad or happy,” Philadelphia 76ers general manager Daryl Morey says. “Now it feels like the offseason and the transactions are more exciting for fans than the games.”

The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement no longer governs only the rules of this league’s business. It’s become a business itself. As the CBA has become more complicated, front offices have engaged in an arms race to hire employees dedicated to understanding it.

But for this to happen, for the league’s most arcane niche to turn into vocations and banter, it had to become accessible for anyone to understand. And the person most responsible for that, as anyone around the league will tell you, is Larry Coon.

In 1999, when Larry Coon called the NBA’s league office to request a copy of the collective bargaining agreement, they were puzzled.

“Why?” Coon recalls them asking. “Nobody ever asks for this.”

Advertisement

Coon, now 61, was a computer scientist working for the University of California, Irvine and teaching that same subject at another state university branch. He was an early internet user, and he was also a Los Angeles Lakers fan who admired Jerry West’s success as a general manager as much as his playing career. Coon’s interests bled together on early internet chatrooms like Usenet, where he discussed and debated basketball with other anonymous basketball junkies.

Coon wasn’t satisfied with the limited amount of publicly available resources, especially about the league’s salary-cap rules. In his computer science field, Frequently Asked Question guides were becoming common resources for the expanding internet. One lunch break, Coon decided the NBA’s salary cap needed one too.

Coon’s first CBA FAQ was incomplete, just an accumulation of publicly available information he had found and read.

“From osmosis,” Coon says.

But another Usenet user shared the number for Rich Cho, who was then an employee for the Seattle SuperSonics. So Coon called him on a whim. (Cho, now the Memphis Grizzlies’ vice president of basketball strategy, could not be reached for this story.)

When Cho answered, he gave a recommendation for Coon: Call the league office and talk to Dan Rube.

Rube, who began working for the NBA in 1995, recalls that first conversation he had with Coon. Today, Rube’s title with the league is executive vice president and deputy general counsel. As the league’s authority on what the CBA’s language actually means to the teams navigating it, Rube saw that Coon was a kindred spirit.

“He pitched this to us on the basis of him being a passionate fan who really had no hidden agendas other than to understand better and to help other people understand better,” Rube says. “He was happy to provide that service. And we believed him.”

Advertisement

After Coon received a spiral-bound physical copy of the league’s 1999 collective bargaining agreement, he soon published a 104-question FAQ in Aug. 1999. “What is a salary cap? Why have one?” reads the first topic on an archived page of Coon’s website, cbafaq.com.

Coon has never been to law school, which he believes helped him turn the legalese of collective bargaining into something accessible. Under an “about the author” heading, Coon explains that his FAQ website is “the kind of reference I was looking for when I was trying to figure it all out.” If the CBA is the dictionary, Coon says, then his explainer is a novel.

“Larry is not a halfway kind of guy,” Rube says. “When he applied himself to (this), he was all in and made it something really, really useful.”

Today, Coon’s FAQs — he says he’s currently entered into his customary “blackout mode” writing the 2023 iteration for the new CBA, which he will complete before this coming season — are considered the foremost publicly available resource for interpreting the salary-cap rules.

“It’s a rite of passage,” says Monte McNair, the Sacramento Kings’ general manager who remembers reading Coon’s FAQ shortly after being hired by the Houston Rockets in 2007. “It’s still one of the first things I recommend to new hires or folks looking to break (into the league).”

Coon’s trust comes not just from his meticulousness, but the extensive relationships he built with front office executives around the league. Coon has had at least a hundred conversations with Rube over the past two decades about the nuanced meanings of certain sentences. In one interaction about an obscure hypothetical, Coon was certain he was right and it was Rube who was wrong.

“You’re saying the right words,” Coon recalls Rube telling him. “But you’re stressing the wrong ones.”

Mike Zarren remembers exactly where he was when he first read Larry Coon’s website.

Advertisement

Today, Zarren is the Boston Celtics’ vice president of basketball operations and team counsel, entering his 20th year with the team after joining as an unpaid intern in 2004. In that time, he has become his team’s salary-cap expert. His role is important enough that one offseason, when he took an African safari vacation, the Celtics rented him a satellite phone to ensure he could be reached — just in case.

But back in 2000, when he first read Coon’s FAQ in the living room of his Chicago apartment, Zarren, much like Coon himself, was a basketball enthusiast who simply wanted to learn more about the league’s inner workings.

“I probably wouldn’t have lasted at the Celtics,” Zarren says, “if it weren’t for Larry and his website.”

“Cap expert” is a term new to the NBA. What typically used to be a side responsibility for an assistant general manager has turned into a dedicated position for all 30 of the league’s front offices. Some teams employ multiple cap-focused employees, and nearly all front office executives are expected to have a working knowledge of it.

“You literally can’t function without (someone in that role),” says Morey, whose interview with The Athletic was interrupted with his own cap expert calling him.

Coon’s FAQs aren’t the final authority, of course. That would still be the actual document and Rube’s department at the NBA. But the CBA has grown larger and more complicated with each new agreement between the league’s owners and players association.

“You can’t sit down and read it,” Zarren says. “You won’t actually learn.”

Sure, Coon’s FAQs won’t provide every single intricate detail. “If you need to figure out how many hotel days a (player) gets when he’s acquired, Larry might not cover that,” McNair says.

But the CBA is less a single coherent document than it is a series of Band-Aids and adjustments applied over decades. Many rules reference other clauses, explained hundreds of pages prior, which makes it difficult for the document to be read cohesively.

Advertisement

Coon’s explainers, while still dense, knit together all these regulations into single blocks of digestible information. Even front office executives have found value in that. “There were moments where it became obvious that this wasn’t just a resource for fans,” Rube says. “(That) it and he had become a resource for teams.”

GO DEEPER

Everything you need to know about the NBA's new collective bargaining agreement

Zarren relied heavily upon Coon’s FAQ during his first few years working in Boston, and he knows many others have done the same. “Countless,” he says, “whether I know them or not.” What was a hobby for Coon has helped some of his readers turn it into vocations.

“Everyone in the league owes him an enormous debt of gratitude for the work that he’s put into that site,” Zarren says. “It’s not the case that anyone deciding to do that would have produced a document that was as useful and readable and insightful as his.”

But because Coon was the first person to make this information accessible, he understands that he has influenced how this league works and the way it’s discussed. When he first wrote his FAQ, he constantly received emails asking for his expertise. He hardly ever does now.

“Has the level of competence around the rules that exist in the CBA increased over time? Sure,” he says. “Did I have an influence on that? Sure. Can I go back and say that any particular instance I see is because of me? Absolutely not.”

In 2009, Beck wrote the first feature story about Coon for The New York Times. A few years later, Coon himself was writing cap-related stories for them, while others were using the resources he created to begin turning the salary cap into content, as well.

“Around 2010, it became clear to me in the internet era and the early stages of the blogging era, that the way NBA media was transforming in a very positive way was that people could come into the space with a lot of specialized interests and dig deep into those,” Beck says.

Advertisement

Today, former front office executives write about salary-cap nuances and cap-focused fan accounts amass thousands of social media followers. Zarren references the way that elections and dating apps increasingly target individuals. Morey believes the NBA 2K franchise and fantasy sports has contributed to this.

“This sort of parallels nearly every field in the world right now, where we’ve just gotten more scientific about everything,”  Zarren says.

Just like streaming services have changed television and film by fracturing the audience into reachable niches, so has the internet changed the audience that media outlets can cater to.

“Larry is the godfather of this entire realm,” Beck says. “He’s the godfather of self-created capologists.”

In Las Vegas last month, at the league’s 2023 summer league, the universe that Larry Coon is creating — both in influence and in the relationships he’s built — is visible all around him.

Coon can scarcely walk down the Thomas & Mack Center stairs or stand aside in the back rooms without running into league executives who know him. In 2016, he created Sports Business Classroom, a weeklong seminar designed for those aspiring to work within the industry of basketball. This year, its 124 students buzz around him between guest-hosted panels, which includes general managers, head coaches and even Jerry West, Coon’s first front-office inspiration.

Coon might not be widely known for his role in turning the salary cap into accessible knowledge and popularizing widespread use of NBAnglish throughout coverage and fandom. But through Sports Business Classroom, which cost between $3,900 and $10,300 last year depending on the timing and access levels of the seminars, he has helped produce several dozen graduates, at least, who now work within or around the league.

Advertisement

The anonymity doesn’t bother him, Coon says. He never quit his university job, never worked within the NBA — never even really considered it. “There was a point in my life where I would have jumped at an (NBA) job offer,” he says. But by the time he published his first FAQ, he had a career and a newborn daughter.

“I was just doing this for my own amusement, my own intellectual curiosity,” he says. “And this is what it turned into.”

If Coon had entered into a world where this league’s salary cap and its mysteries had already been made accessible, perhaps on a plain-text website arranged by frequently asked questions, he might have been someone who studied his site, attended his classroom, maybe even ended up with a “salary-cap expert” title in a front office. Instead, he was simply the person who started the league down this path where salary-cap rules are referenced with almost the same ubiquity as dunks or 3s.

And Coon doesn’t need it to have happened any other way.

“The NBA is a great ecosystem. Help take care of it, and it’ll take care of you,” he says. “I found that directly.”

(Illustration by John Bradford / The Athletic. Photos courtesy of Larry Coon and via Lawrence K. Ho / Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k3Fob2hnZnxzfJFsZmlwX2h9cLjAq6myZZOkvK95zZuYZquRoa6zxYycmKln