🏀 Basketball Reference Scraper

🚀 Export NBA player statistics in seconds. No API key, no login, no limits on what season or stat type you pull.

The Basketball Reference Scraper extracts NBA player statistics from Basketball Reference, the authoritative source for basketball data. Whether you need scoring leaders, advanced efficiency metrics, or raw season totals, this actor pulls the complete player table for any season and stat type you choose.

Data is scraped in real-time from the official public stats pages - no caching, no stale records, no truncation.

Coverage

• Seasons: NBA 1950-present (75+ seasons of historical data)
• Stat types: Per Game, Totals, Advanced
• Players per season: 450-550 active players
• Fields per player: 19 data points covering scoring, playmaking, defense, and shooting efficiency

Target Audience / Use Cases

Who	Why
Sports analysts	Build season-over-season performance comparisons
Fantasy basketball managers	Track player stats across a full season
Data scientists	Train prediction models on historical NBA data
Sports journalists	Pull quick stats for game previews and recaps
Basketball researchers	Study long-term trends in the NBA
Developers	Power sports dashboards and apps

📋 What the Basketball Reference Scraper does

• Fetches the full player stats table for any NBA season from 1950 to present
• Supports three stat types: Per Game averages, Season Totals, and Advanced metrics
• Parses all player rows including name, team, position, age, and full stat line
• Handles traded players correctly (returns the combined TOT row, not duplicates)
• Converts all numeric stats to proper number types (no string parsing needed)
• Limits free users to 10 items as a preview; paid users get the full dataset

💡 Why it matters: Basketball Reference is the gold standard for NBA stats. Every number here is the same one scouts, analysts, and broadcasters rely on. Getting it programmatically means you can build tools that stay current automatically.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: age, assists, blocks, gamesPlayed, minutesPerGame, playerName, playerUrl, points, position, rebounds, results, season, statType, steals, team. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account (includes $5 credit)
2. Open the Basketball Reference Scraper actor
3. Set your season year (e.g. 2024) and statType (per_game, totals, or advanced)
4. Set maxItems to how many players you want (up to 500+ for full season)
5. Click Run and wait a few seconds
6. Download your dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for scrapers across 100+ data sources - sports, finance, jobs, real estate, and more.

This actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sports Reference LLC or Basketball Reference. Data is accessed from publicly available web pages for informational and research purposes.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.