Web Scraping Basketball Reference using R

I'm interested in extracting the player tables on basketball-reference.com. I have successfully extracted the per game statistics table for a specific player (i.e. LeBron James, as an example), which is the first table listed on the web page. However, there are 10+ tables on the page that I can't seem to extract. I've been able to get the table into R a couple different ways. First, using the rvest package:

library(rvest)
lebron <- "https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/j/jamesle01.html"
lebron_webpage <- read_html(lebron)
lebron_table <- html_table(lebron_webpage, fill = TRUE)
lebron_pergame <- data.frame(lebron_table)

Now I have LeBron's per game statistics from his career in a nice data frame. I'm also able to read the same table in using a combination of the XML and RCurl package.

library(RCurl)
library(XML)
lebron_url <- paste0(lebron)
lebron_url <- getURL(lebron_url)
lebron_table <- readHTMLTable(lebron_url, which = 1)

The problem comes if I want to read in an other table on the page. For example, the next table on the page is Totals. I've tried using a CSS selector to select the specific table I want to read in, but I can't get that to work. I've also tried to right click, inspect element on the page and copy the XPath for the table, but I also can't get that to work. I've spent a lot of time researching this issue on Google, but can't seem to find anything that solves this problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

The following tables are loaded dynamically (js). So you have many possibilities to extract your tables.

Using RSelenium to simulate user navigation :

library(rvest)
library(RSelenium)
lebron <- "https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/j/jamesle01.html"
rD <- rsDriver()
remDr <- rD[["client"]]
remDr$navigate(lebron)
lebron_webpage <- read_html(remDr$getPageSource()[[1]])
lebron_table <- html_table(lebron_webpage, fill = TRUE)

for (i in 1:length(lebron_table)) 
assign(paste0("table_",i),data.frame(lebron_table[i]))
#You can rename your table by a title to be more explicit

Another way is to gather the js transaction and see if you can get the json results.

Hope that will helps

Gottavianoni