Basketball Reference is a great resource to aggregate statistics on NBA teams, seasons, players, and games. This package provides methods to acquire data for all these categories in pre-parsed and simplified formats.

I wrote this library as an exercise for creating my first PyPi package. Hopefully, you find it easy to use. Install using the following command:

pip install basketball-reference-scraper

Alternatively, you can just clone this repo and import the libraries at your own discretion.

Yes, scrapers and APIs do exist. The primary API used currently is for stats.nba.com, but the website blocks too many requests, hindering those who want to acquire a lot of data. Additionally, scrapers for Basketball Reference do exist, but none of them load dynamically rendered content. These scrapers can only acquire statically loaded content, preventing those who want statistics in certain formats (for example, Player Advanced Stats Per Game).

Currently, the package contains 5 modules: teams, players, seasons, box_scores, pbp, shot_charts, and injury_report. The package will be expanding to include other content as well, but this is a start.

For full details on the API please refer to the documentation.