LAS VEGAS – The smell of cigarettes and cheap beer that cloaks the Vegas casinos has weakened by 7 a.m., though a handful of blackjack players are doing their part to keep their Sunday night from becoming a Monday morning.
The table minimums have dropped, the slots aren’t ringing and employees are standing around with nothing really to do.
A town that rarely sleeps has, for the most part, tucked itself in.
But inside the Palms Casino and Resort, nearly 20 students, wide-awake, are attacking Monday morning with enthusiastic discussion in the corner of a 24-hour café.
They’ve paid $2,500 to come to Vegas to try to hit the jackpot – making the right contacts, learning the right information and eventually, scoring a job in the NBA.
At the center of it, Larry Coon, a computer scientist from Rancho Santa Margarita, is surrounded by students during his “office hours.” Between bites of $12 eggs and sips of strong coffee, they digest the basketball news that’s dominating the NBA world: Tim Duncan, 19-season fixture, 15-time All-Star and five-time NBA champion, has announced his retirement.
The sports talk shows will compare Duncan to Kobe Bryant and argue about Duncan’s place in league history. But, that’s not the primary interest of these students.
They ask the one kind of question they came all the way to Vegas to fully understand.
“What does this mean for (Duncan’s) salary cap hold?”
As his students reduced one of the best players ever to a monetary figure over breakfast, Coon munched fruit and filled in the gaps of the conversation.
In a city that derives so much pleasure from gluttony, this tiny corner of the Palms is slathered in sports geekdom, causing Coon to crack a big smile.
It is, after all, a world he helped create.
That Coon is the godfather of this movement defies visual expectations.
A middle-aged man who’s more likely to buy a pocket protector than come off a screen-and-roll and throw a pocket pass, one who says he has no desire to even pick up a basketball, has become one of the most knowledgeable people in the NBA.
His hair has grayed, his shoulders tend to slouch, and this day in Vegas, he looks like any one of the thousand convention-goers in town, corporate polo and khakis included.
If Coon looks more the part of office-dweller than NBA revolutionary, there’s a reason for it.
He spends his days in the information technology offices at UC Irvine, managing major projects and evangelizing business analytics.
But over the course of more than 15 years, he’s used his nights to become an indispensable part of the NBA fabric, operating the go-to reference used by teams, players, agents and reporters.
When it comes to understanding the rules that get your favorite players to and from your favorite teams, Coon is the person people turn to.
THE RIDE
“You think you know something? You really want to know it?” Coon says. “Explain it to others.”
After his office hours, Coon and one of his protégés load up in Coon’s silver Mazda and head over to the UNLV campus, which is hosting the Sports Business Classroom in addition to the NBA’s Summer League.
Coon starts to recount his journey, always staying on script, trying not to deviate from the linear order of events. He knows how he wants to explain things.
It’s his area of expertise.
His “CBA FAQ” has become a staple in web browsers around the league, breaking down the 154,274-word collective bargaining agreement – approximately the same length as “The Grapes of Wrath” – that lays out the financial rules for the NBA into more palatable terms.
Before Golden State general manager Bob Myers won the 2015 Executive of the Year award and built a team that won a single-season record 73 games and signed the biggest free agent available in Kevin Durant, he was merely a law student with a thirst for NBA knowledge.
To quench it, he tried to study the CBA.
“Anyone who knows and has tried to do it, it’s very dense,” Myers said. “Larry was the first person to break it down into layman’s terms, into ways that were succinct, efficient.
“It was like the CliffsNotes version of the CBA.”
People trying to find work in the NBA’s front offices now had the companion to a document that could make even the trained eye crust over. The phrase “in accordance” appears 259 times in the 2011 CBA; “notwithstanding” is there 128 times.
Neither appears in Coon’s FAQ.
“You can’t learn the cap by studying the collective bargaining agreement,” Portland General Manager Neil Olshey said. “Larry did that FAQ that had all the questions, and what Larry did better than anybody is he made it digestible for people who didn’t have that high-end mathematics background. That’s why I was able to use it.”
Coon’s trip to NBA celebrity began in a place so many Southern California basketball fans have been – watching the Lakers and listening to Chick Hearn.
But instead of being inspired to shoot jump shots, Coon’s love of basketball drifted to the mechanical side.
How, he wondered, were teams able to get certain players and not others. What could they pay them? Were there limits? What were the loopholes? And who are the people smart enough to exploit them.
Coon’s an obsessive, and he sought the answers with the same voracity that led his cycling habit to become, at one time, a 500-mile-a-week routine.
“It’s easy to find the rules of basketball, dribbling, out of bounds, the 3-point line, yadda yadda, but that’s part of the game,” Coon says before the Las Vegas Strip can fill up. “The real season is what happens in the front offices.”
Familiar with computers from when he taught himself how to be a programmer in the Santa Ana College lab, Coon eventually found people asking the same questions on the internet, participating in discussions through NBA Usenet message boards.
While there, he came across the original CBA FAQ compiled by another amateur “capologist,” and decided it wasn’t helpful enough. He’d be the one to change that.
“It was a fun research project,” Coon says. “… It’s common in the computer science industry, if someone is good at something, they write an FAQ. Give back. Explain it.”
Friends from the Usenet groups got a hold of lower-level NBA executives and bounced Coon’s work off of them, checking for mistakes. Eventually, he and his internet buddies called the NBA and got their hands on the actual CBA document.
“I became more and more of the guy who had this stuff, “ he says, “and I wanted to learn more.”
Coon’s original FAQ, which published in 1999, was a constantly evolving project, being updated in between the naps of his newborn daughter Megan. People who were interested had questions, and they turned to Coon for answers.
He called the league office, asking questions about the CBA. No one, at least no one as enthusiastic and as smart as Coon, had called and been so inquisitive.
“He had more of an appetite than most for that kind of stuff,” NBA deputy general counsel Dan Rube said.
Coon called Rube and other contacts in the league offices, stealing five minutes or so of their time to tackle one of his questions about the CBA. Then he did it again. And again. And again.
The NBA, which hadn’t been fielding a lot of these calls, kept answering the phone.
“What could be better?” Coon asks without a hint of sarcasm.
For most people, of course, a tax audit would be better than poring through a legal document like the CBA. But, for Coon, talking about it and how it affects the NBA, is how he spends much of his free time.
“It’s sort of him at the level of Yoda and me at the level of some babbling idiot. He at least talks to me about it. He doesn’t patronize me or anything.,” said Tony Toyofuku, Coon’s friend and co-worker at UCI.
Coon’s ability to take the extremely technical and buff off some of the intimidating language is the skill that holds all of this together.
“He can distill these very arcane concepts and break them down so a layperson can understand exactly what he’s talking about,” Toyofuku said.
THE DESTINATION
In Coon’s defense, it was always going to be a tight right-hand turn.
As he pulled into the VIP parking lot near the Thomas & Mack Center, the man who knows everything about cap space misjudges car space, scraping his ride against a red pole.
His story, like the car, comes to a stop.
Coon parks and examines the damage – it’s minimal – before shrugging it off.
“That’s what insurance is for,” he says.
Later, he’ll proudly send a picture of the back right panel (“Not a scratch.”)
Coon’s undeniably happy this Monday, and the group of people about to parade into the conference room are the reason why.
Taking something that’s confusing like the CBA and breaking it down into easier-to-swallow bites is his calling – in both careers.
“Computer software and legal language are both communication that’s intended to be as unambiguous as possible,” he said. “… You’re taking these instructions, the rules, the system, and you’re communicating in a way that’s completely unambiguous. And, it’s not like I had any special ability, but I can read the legal stuff of the CBA and I might have had a better understanding than the common person on the basis of my background.”
This was why the original FAQ worked so well. Now, he just had to let people know about it.
Coon sought out newspaper stories about CBA issues or salary figures, and if a writer botched a term or misunderstood a concept, Coon would email and send a link to his FAQ. It’s a practice Coon continues today, reaching out when a writer gets a term incorrect or misunderstands a concept.
“There’s a movement known as scientific skepticism. I identify with that,” he says. “It’s just something where any truth claims are as good as the evidence says they are.”
The CBA – the document itself – was the evidence Coon kept turning to.
In that quest for understanding, Coon kept digging, asking and answering questions, and as new CBAs were agreed to in 2005 and 2011, he’d update the FAQ.
In current form, his website looks very much like it did in 1999 – basic graphics at the top and nothing but an endless ocean of text and charts below it.
There are no advertisements, no photos, no frills. It was strictly a reference, never intended to be a source of income.
“He did it altruistically,” Myers said. “There was no incentive to do it, right? That’s cool.”
While the site itself doesn’t generate any income, his position as an expert in the field does put some cash in Coon’s pockets. He’s worked for NBA teams in the past on a part-time, project-managing basis. He’s contributed work to ESPN.com and other media outlets and been cited in the biggest newspapers coast to coast.
Around the UCI offices, he’s impressed (and surprised) his co-workers with his “celebrity.” While Coon doesn’t like to gloat about the people who have popped into his office on campus to meet the CBA guru, co-workers like Toyofuku revel in it, laughing his way through those stories.
Coon likes to keep his UCI and NBA lives separate – think Bruce Wayne without the danger and the fancy belt. And while teams have approached him in the past about full-time opportunities, he’s not looking to leave the UC system anytime soon.
At UCI, he’s been a part of implementing a complex systems transition that will eventually change everything from payroll to student services. And, he wants to see that through.
“It’s my career,” he says.
Maybe when his pension fully vests, maybe when the systems are up and running, he’ll do this full time – just not yet.
But when you see him talk about the CBA and the NBA salary cap, you can see why he devotes so much time and energy to the thing he calls his “hobby.”
The exciting part about Coon’s class in Vegas isn’t the material. It’d be easier to count cards than figure out how the salary cap is calculated.
Like his website, the frills are minimal. The introductory course? It’s called “Salary Cap 101”; it’s printed in plain font on a white screen.
“It’s a smart move for me,” Megan Bossey, a 20-year-old student at the University of Louisville who dropped a summer class to pay for the course, said.
The stuff they learn isn’t for everyone, and even Coon knows it, taking breaks when things get a little dense.
But applying it? That’s different.
The morning session is about to wrap up, and Coon splits the class into small groups.
Each is given fictional control of a NBA team, and operating within the confines of the salary cap, the group is charged with making a three-year plan.
Who do you sign? Who do you release? How do you assemble a winner?
They’re the same questions that turned Coon’s hobby into an obsession.
As they pored over their teams ledgers, Coon would close his eyes and do the computations. If he’d get stumped, he’d pull up his own FAQ for the answers.
An hour in, the room explodes into trade chatter. The Lakers are talking to the Celtics who are talking to the Bulls who are talking to the Thunder.
He institutes a fictional trade deadline; people are frantically walking around the room negotiating. It’s a scene he’d relay to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver later that afternoon, so proud of what was happening.
He wasn’t alone in his world anymore. Thanks, in part, to the FAQ, you don’t need to look good in a jersey to find a place in professional basketball.
Coon watches the room fill with talk about trades and salary cap implications, hustling around the room to soak it in. These people aren’t hiding in the corners of the internet anymore.
And while it all unfolds, the chatter about trade exceptions, stretch provisions and Bird rights, he doesn’t try to hide his glee.
This is the NBA he loves, a ball and a basket nowhere to be seen.
Contact the writer: dwoike@ocregister.com
