A Chrome Extension Lets You Check Any NBA Player’s Stats Just By Hovering Over Their Name

This is the best thing I’ve stumbled upon ever since this global pandemic started, and one of the greatest tools I’ve ever seen for NBA fans.

This will make my life easier, and likely some of yours, too. It also makes it way easier to settle a debate, when it comes to players’ statistics.

British NBA enthusiast and LeBron James fan, Alex Franklin developed a Google Chrome browser extension called Click and Roll.

Click and Roll searches web pages for the names of 4500+ current and former NBA players. It colors the name of any player it finds in teal. You can then view the player’s stats just by hovering over their name. The best thing about it? It works just as advertised and is completely free.

We talked to Alex and found out that when he was reading up on trades and free agency moves last summer, especially these with multiple players and teams involved, that he, like many of us, kept tabbing out to Google or Basketball Reference to look up role-players and bench guys on small market teams. The initial idea for the extension came, when a colleague of Franklin was working on an extension that would do the same thing for politicians and their voting records.

“Around the same time, a colleague of mine was working on an extension that would highlight the names of politicians and link out to their voting records. I figured that same sort of contextual annotation could work for sports: what if I could see a player’s stats right on the same page.”

The Londoner, who works as a software developer, then traded ideas with his colleague, before carrying on to finish the product by himself.

“My colleague and I traded ideas on how to approach the text search and highlighting part, then carried on separately. I kept working on Click and Roll in my free time here and there until it was finally done.”

After finishing the browser extension, he originally wanted to wait until the offseason, before releasing and sharing it, but given the current pandemic, and the NBA hiatus that came with it, he pre-released it for people to use during these difficult times. Definitely a silver lining.

If you’re interested, and you should, because it is amazing (I’m not getting paid for it, I just saw the product and love it), check out the following links: