Basketball-Reference.com contains many tables of data for players, teams, seasons. For example, the Advanced Stats table on the Seasons page is where I’ve been getting data for the Offensive and Defensive Ratings posts. I grab the data by clicking “Share & Export” beside the table, “Get table as CSV”, and then copying and pasting that into a text editor. (In this case, don’t copy the first row; and you never want a comma at the end of the last line.) Save this file, and then it can be opened (as a CSV) in R, Python, or a spreadsheet application like microsoft Excel.

Such tables/spreadsheets or “flat files” are easy for humans to read but aren’t very efficient from a data storage perspective. As a result, big data are stored in less human-readable formats, and special software is needed to access that data and convert it into tables on the user’s end.

NBA.com’s API (ie, a bit of software) is among the most popular sources of free NBA big data. To access it, you need software on your end, and most NBA.com API clients seem to be in Python (nba_api package) or R (hoopR, nbastatR).

This page provides a long list NBA data sources: [Josh Gonzalez on Medium] An Ever-Expanding List of NBA Data Sources