In today's New York Times, Howard Beck profiles Larry Coon, a middle-aged computer scientist who writes, edits and manages the popular NBA Salary Cap FAQ website. (You know, the site that attempts to explain Bird rights, base-year compensations, over-36 rules — those ol' salary cap chestnuts — to nitwits like me.)

Anyway, it's well worth the read, if only to see the man and mustache behind the basic HTML code. A favorite passage:

The collective bargaining agreement is 425 pages of legalese, jargon and run-on sentences, a dizzying compendium of decades of negotiations between the N.B.A. and the players union. It describes the salary cap, exceptions to the cap and exceptions to those exceptions. It was written by lawyers and seemingly for lawyers. [...]

Coon is not a lawyer, just a lifelong Los Angeles Lakers fan with an inquisitive mind, an eye for detail and enough spare hours to make sense of the nonsensical.

"I’ve been told by lawyers many times that I think like a lawyer," said Coon, an information technology director at California-Irvine. "I don’t know if that was an insult or not."

He first compiled the FAQ (frequently asked questions) in 1999, and has updated it periodically since then, making his biggest changes in 2005, when the last C.B.A. was adopted.

"Part of it’s just a fastidious nature, and being a voracious reader," Coon said of his motivation. "You just slowly accumulate knowledge, and eventually you get to the point where you’re reading stuff in the media and stuff is conflicting."

Coon's work has endeared him to reporters for years. He estimates that he has answered 3,000 cap-related e-mail messages in the last 10 years. Inquiries usually spike around the February trading deadline and the July free-agency period.