The New York Times’ Connections puzzle has spawned a Sports Edition through The Athletic, and the May 12 puzzle (No. 596) proves something we already suspected: sports fans don’t all know the same things. Someone obsessed with basketball will blank on Serie A clubs. A Formula 1 devotee might struggle with WNBA history. That fragmentation is what makes this puzzle simultaneously maddening and brilliant.
Today’s puzzle followed a straightforward theme structure. The yellow group (easiest) asked players to identify things that describe being “out of practice”: cold, off, rusty, and sluggish. The green group pivoted to tennis equipment anatomy: butt, grip, grommets, and strings. Blue shifted to Oklahoma City Thunder roster members like Dort, Holmgren, Joe, and Wallace. The purple group, predictably the hardest, landed on phrases that work with “clock”: game, pitch, play, and shot.
But the real story lives in the historical puzzles the site has already published. Those categories reveal just how niche sports knowledge gets.
Where Sports Trivia Gets Genuinely Hard
The purple group difficulty tier is where things get genuinely interesting. One category asked solvers to name Serie A clubs: Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio, Roma. Unless you follow Italian soccer closely, you’re guessing. Another featured WNBA MVPs (Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles, Stewart), which feels brutally specific if you don’t regularly follow women’s basketball.
Then there’s the Premier League team nicknames category. Bees, Cherries, Foxes, and Hammers. These aren’t the official names you’d find on a jersey. They’re cultural shorthand, earned through decades of fandom and tradition. A casual sports fan might know that the Foxes refers to Leicester City, but Cherries for AFC Bournemouth? That requires actual immersion in English soccer culture.
The most delightfully absurd category asked for homophones of NBA player names: Barns (Barnes), Connect (Conley), Heart (Hartenstein), and Hero (Herro). This one isn’t about sports knowledge at all. It’s about pattern recognition and wordplay masquerading as a sports question. You could nail it while knowing nothing about the actual players.
The Puzzle’s Real Edge
What makes Connections: Sports Edition sharper than its general counterpart is that it doesn’t pretend everyone knows everything. Sports fandom is tribal and specific. My neighbor might crush questions about Minnesota teams but bomb anything about MLS. Your coworker could ace every Formula 1 question and struggle with college basketball. The puzzle leans into that reality rather than fighting it.
That’s also what makes it genuinely difficult. The general Connections puzzle tests vocabulary and pattern recognition in relatively neutral ways. The sports version demands actual knowledge you either have or you don’t. You can’t logic your way through “Who’s the current star of the Sacramento Kings” the way you might work through a word association puzzle.
The puzzle lives in The Athletic’s app or free online, which is notable because it doesn’t appear in the standard NYT Games app. That gatekeeping actually makes sense. The Athletic is a subscription service owned by The Times, and the Sports Edition feels distinctly tailored to their audience. It’s not trying to be universally accessible. It’s trying to be specifically satisfying for people who care enough about sports to subscribe.
The Beauty of Fragmented Knowledge
Here’s what really matters though: this puzzle works precisely because sports knowledge is so fragmented. No single person dominates all categories. That’s true of sports itself, of course. The person who knows every NBA stat might not follow rugby. The cricket fanatic might draw a blank on NHL history.
Connections: Sports Edition just makes that fragmentation visible in puzzle form. It’s a reminder that expertise isn’t monolithic, and that’s kind of wonderful. It means you can solve three categories easily and hit a wall on the fourth. It means bragging rights are harder to earn because they’re actually specific to something you know deeply.
Whether you’re crushing it on the May 12 puzzle or not, that’s the real point. You’re not being tested on whether you’re a “real” sports fan. You’re being tested on whether you know the specific slices of sports that matter to you.
