The rvest implementation was the main thing that seemed like an R port of the python implementation rather than best use of rvest.<p>An alternate (simpler) implementation of the rvest web scraping example is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;jimhester&#x2F;01087e190618cc91a213" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;jimhester&#x2F;01087e190618cc91a213</a><p>It would be even simpler but basketball-reference designs it&#x27;s tables for humans rather than for easy scraping.