Scraping www.basketball-reference.com
www.basketball-reference.com requires Stealth Playwright (Tier 1) because the site uses javascript challenges (perimeterx, datadome, basic anti-bot). Cheaper engine tiers fail; this is the cheapest one that actually works.
Why Stealth Playwright wins on www.basketball-reference.com
Headless Chromium with the stealth plugin and fingerprint injection passes JavaScript challenges that simple HTTP cannot. Slower and 3x more expensive than JA4, but unavoidable for sites that gate rendering behind a JS challenge.
Cost math: at 3 credits per request, scraping www.basketball-reference.com costs $0.30–$0.54 per 1,000 requests on the Starter tier. Compare to ScrapingBee ($1.40/1K) or Firecrawl (~$5.33/1K flat). For high-volume workloads on this domain, the credit-based model lands cheaper.
Try www.basketball-reference.com in the playground
10 free requests per day, no signup. The router picks the engine — you get clean markdown back.
Other domains we route through Stealth Playwright
Sites with similar protection profiles. Each link goes to its own intel page with real production routing data.