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.”