eliteprospects

Unofficial access to eliteprospects.com hockey data — leagues, teams, players, and staff — as structured output rather than scraped HTML.

It comes in two forms backed by the same TypeScript core: a command-line tool for browsing and searching from the terminal (with --json for piping into other tools), and an MCP server that exposes the same lookups to MCP clients such as Claude. No API key and no build step.

MCP server

The same functionality is exposed to MCP clients (e.g. Claude) by bin/eliteprospects-mcp, a Model Context Protocol server speaking JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio. It is dependency-free — the protocol is implemented directly in src/mcp.ts.

Tools:

Register it with an MCP client by pointing at the launcher, e.g. in a mcpServers config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "eliteprospects": {
      "command": "bun",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/eliteprospects/bin/eliteprospects-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

See also: https://coworkerai.io/guide/mcp-setup

How it works

EliteProspects is a Next.js site. Two data sources are used, both structured JSON rather than scraped HTML:

• Index pages (e.g. /leagues) embed their data in a <script id="__NEXT_DATA__"> tag. See src/leagues.ts.
• Detail pages (e.g. /league/<slug>) sit behind a Cloudflare challenge in their rendered form, so we instead fetch Next.js's data endpoint /_next/data/<buildId>/<route>.json, which returns the same pageProps and is not challenged. The buildId changes per deploy, so it is read at runtime from the reachable /leagues page and cached. See src/client.ts and src/league.ts.

Search uses a different backend entirely: the site's autocomplete API at autocomplete.eliteprospects.com (the same one the site's search box uses). It is a separate, unauthenticated host — not behind the Cloudflare challenge, and not subject to the member limits of the on-site search form. The /all endpoint returns mixed types (each tagged with _type); /players, /staff, /teams, and /leagues each return a single type. See src/search.ts.

Team, player, and staff URLs carry both an id and a slug (/team/42107/aalborg-u18, /player/8862/joe-sakic, /staff/14739/daniel-rasmussen). A request for the id alone soft-redirects to the canonical path, which the scraper follows to learn the slug — so teams, players, and staff work from just the numeric id. This id→slug resolution lives in fetchEntityData (src/client.ts) and is shared by src/team.ts and src/profile.ts.

Country codes

EliteProspects identifies countries with ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes (DNK). The output and --country filter use the more universal alpha-2 form (DK); both forms are accepted as input. The two UK home nations EP lists separately — England and Scotland — are not ISO countries and have no alpha-2, so they keep the ISO 3166-2 subdivision codes GB-ENG / GB-SCT (distinct from GB = U.K.). The mapping is an embedded, verified ISO table — see src/countries.ts.

Project layout

• bin/eliteprospects — CLI launcher
• bin/eliteprospects-mcp — MCP server launcher
• src/cli.ts — command parsing and output formatting
• src/mcp.ts — MCP (Model Context Protocol) server
• src/client.ts — HTTP fetching (HTML + Next.js data endpoint)
• src/nextData.ts — __NEXT_DATA__ extraction
• src/leagues.ts — leagues-list parser
• src/league.ts — single-league parser
• src/team.ts — single-team parser (metadata + roster)
• src/profile.ts — player and staff profile parsers
• src/search.ts — autocomplete search
• src/countries.ts — ISO alpha-3 ↔ alpha-2 conversion
• src/types.ts — shared types

Development

bun install     # install dev dependencies (TypeScript, @types/bun)
bun run typecheck

Requirements

• Bun >= 1.0 (runs TypeScript natively — no build step)

Usage

# List all leagues
./bin/eliteprospects leagues

# Filter by country — accepts a 2- or 3-letter code (DK or DNK)
./bin/eliteprospects leagues --country DK

# Machine-readable output
./bin/eliteprospects leagues --json

# Show a single league: metadata, teams, and available seasons
./bin/eliteprospects leagues denmark-u18

# A specific season
./bin/eliteprospects leagues denmark-u18 --season 2024-2025

# Show a team by id: metadata, roster, and available seasons
./bin/eliteprospects teams 42107
./bin/eliteprospects teams 42107 --season 2024-2025

# Show a player's profile by id (bio, draft, current team)
./bin/eliteprospects players 8862

# Look a player up by name instead of id (renders only on a single match)
./bin/eliteprospects players --search "connor mcdavid"

# Show a staff member's profile by id (role, current team)
./bin/eliteprospects staff 14739

# Staff can be looked up by name too
./bin/eliteprospects staff --search "daniel rasmussen"

# Search by name (across players, staff, teams, leagues)
./bin/eliteprospects search "connor mcdavid"

# Limit search to one type (--player, --staff, --team, --league)
./bin/eliteprospects search rasmussen --staff

# Help
./bin/eliteprospects help

search is the way to find an id to feed into the other commands. It returns a TYPE column so a result's id can be used with players, staff, teams, or leagues as appropriate. For the common case of looking up one person, players/staff also accept --search <name>, which runs the search for you and renders the profile when there is exactly one match (erroring, and listing the candidates, when there are several).

Players and staff are separate commands because they are separate id namespaces: player 14739 and staff 14739 are different people. A person can hold both a player and a staff profile (e.g. Daniel Rasmussen is player 16271 and staff 14739), and each profile links to the other in its output.