Nowadays, there is at least one better tool, called slimit:

SlimIt is a JavaScript minifier written in Python. It compiles JavaScript into more compact code so that it downloads and runs faster.

SlimIt also provides a library that includes a JavaScript parser, lexer, pretty printer and a tree visitor.

Demo:

Imagine we have the following javascript code:

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: 'http://www.example.com',
    data: {
        email: '[email protected]',
        phone: '9999999999',
        name: 'XYZ'
    }
});

And now we need to get email, phone and name values from the data object.

The idea here would be to instantiate a slimit parser, visit all nodes, filter all assignments and put them into the dictionary:

from slimit import ast
from slimit.parser import Parser
from slimit.visitors import nodevisitor


data = """
$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: 'http://www.example.com',
    data: {
        email: '[email protected]',
        phone: '9999999999',
        name: 'XYZ'
    }
});
"""

parser = Parser()
tree = parser.parse(data)
fields = {getattr(node.left, 'value', ''): getattr(node.right, 'value', '')
          for node in nodevisitor.visit(tree)
          if isinstance(node, ast.Assign)}

print fields

It prints:

{'name': "'XYZ'", 
 'url': "'http://www.example.com'", 
 'type': '"POST"', 
 'phone': "'9999999999'", 
 'data': '', 
 'email': "'[email protected]'"}

You can extract JSON from arbitrary text with the jsonfinder library:

from jsonfinder import jsonfinder
import requests

scrape_url = "https://swishanalytics.com/optimus/nba/daily-fantasy-projections?date=2016-12-15"
content = requests.get(scrape_url).text
for _, __, obj in jsonfinder(content, json_only=True):
    if (obj and
            isinstance(obj, list) and
            isinstance(obj[0], dict) and
            {'player_id', 'event_id', 'name'}.issubset(obj[0])
            ):
        break
else:
    raise ValueError('data not found')

# Now you can use obj
print(len(obj))
print(obj[0])