NBA Stats MCP server

This NBA MCP Server enhances Anthropic's Claude LLM by providing access to recent NBA games and statistics that the model might not have in its knowledge base. The server leverages the open-source nba_api package to fetch game data, scores, and player statistics.

Installation

To install the NBA MCP Server, follow these steps:

# Clone the repository first, then run these commands in the repo directory
uv venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
uv pip install -e .

After installation, you'll need to add the configuration to your Claude config as you would for any other MCP Server.

Capabilities

The NBA MCP Server provides several features to extend Claude's knowledge about NBA games:

Available Data

• Game Scores: Fetch final scores for games that happened yesterday or in the past
• Basic Player Statistics: Access points, rebounds, and assists breakdowns for players from past games
• Detailed Player Statistics: Retrieve comprehensive stats including PTS/REB/AST/STL/BLK/TO/PLUS_MINUS/MIN for past games
• Four Factors Analysis: Obtain the four factors (shooting efficiency, turnover rate, rebounding percentage, and free throw rate) for past games

Usage

Once properly configured in your Claude settings, you can prompt Claude to access NBA statistics from past games. For example:

• "What was the score of yesterday's NBA games?"
• "Show me the stats for Lebron James from last night's game"
• "What were the four factors in the Celtics vs Lakers game from last week?"

Claude will use this MCP server to retrieve the relevant NBA data and incorporate it into its responses.

How to install this MCP server

For Claude Code

To add this MCP server to Claude Code, run this command in your terminal:

claude mcp add-json "nba-mcp-server" '{"command":"python","args":["-m","nba_mcp_server"]}'

See the official Claude Code MCP documentation for more details.

For Cursor

There are two ways to add an MCP server to Cursor. The most common way is to add the server globally in the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file so that it is available in all of your projects.

If you only need the server in a single project, you can add it to the project instead by creating or adding it to the .cursor/mcp.json file.

Adding an MCP server to Cursor globally

To add a global MCP server go to Cursor Settings > Tools & Integrations and click "New MCP Server".

When you click that button the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file will be opened and you can add your server like this:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "nba-mcp-server": {
            "command": "python",
            "args": [
                "-m",
                "nba_mcp_server"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Adding an MCP server to a project

To add an MCP server to a project you can create a new .cursor/mcp.json file or add it to the existing one. This will look exactly the same as the global MCP server example above.

How to use the MCP server

Once the server is installed, you might need to head back to Settings > MCP and click the refresh button.

The Cursor agent will then be able to see the available tools the added MCP server has available and will call them when it needs to.

You can also explicitly ask the agent to use the tool by mentioning the tool name and describing what the function does.

For Claude Desktop

To add this MCP server to Claude Desktop:

1. Find your configuration file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
• Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

2. Add this to your configuration file:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "nba-mcp-server": {
            "command": "python",
            "args": [
                "-m",
                "nba_mcp_server"
            ]
        }
    }
}

3. Restart Claude Desktop for the changes to take effect