Sports-Stats MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol server that exposes a read-only SQLite database of real NBA game data to LLM clients (Claude Desktop, etc.), enabling safe natural-language querying of the data.

The dataset is FiveThirtyEight's historical NBA Elo dataset: 63,157 games across 69 seasons (1947–2015). npm run seed downloads it and loads it into a clean relational schema.

What it does

The server registers two tools that an LLM can call:

Safety: read-only guardrails

run_query validates every statement before execution and rejects:

• anything that isn't a SELECT / WITH query,

• write & DDL keywords (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, DROP, ALTER, CREATE, PRAGMA, ATTACH, …),

• multiple chained statements (SQL-injection style ; DROP …).

As a second line of defense, the database itself is opened in readonly mode.

Related MCP server: Volleyball MCP Server

Data model

Two tables derived from the source dataset (the raw CSV stores two rows per game — one per team — which the seed collapses into one clean row per game):

teams(id, franchise)                          -- e.g. ('LAL', 'Lakers')
games(id, season, game_date, is_playoffs, neutral,
      home_team_id → teams, away_team_id → teams,
      home_score, away_score)

Setup

npm install
npm run build      # compile TypeScript -> dist/
npm run seed       # download the real dataset + populate sports.db (~18 MB download, cached)

Use with Claude Desktop

Add this to your Claude Desktop config (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS), then restart Claude Desktop:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sports-stats": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/Users/mayanknayak/Desktop/Personal Projects/mcp-sports-server/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

You'll see a tools icon appear. Now ask natural-language questions:

• "Which franchise won the most games in the 1996 season?"

• "Show the 5 highest-scoring games of all time."

• "What's the Lakers' all-time playoff win percentage?"

• "Which team had the biggest average margin of victory in the 1980s?"

Claude will call list_schema, then write and run a SELECT via run_query.

Smoke test (no Claude Desktop needed)

node test-client.mjs

Spins up the server over stdio and verifies tool discovery, schema introspection, a real aggregate query, and that a DELETE is blocked by the guard.

Stack

TypeScript · @modelcontextprotocol/sdk · better-sqlite3 · zod