The New York Times has a funny way of making us feel smart and stupid in the same afternoon. One minute you’re cruising through Wordle, feeling like a linguistic genius. The next, you’re staring at aConnections puzzle wondering how “JUICE” could possibly relate to “ORANGE” and “ZEST” and “POULTRY.” But when they roll out the Sports Edition, things get even more delightfully chaotic.
Published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism arm owned by The Times, the Sports Edition variant has carved out a niche for itself among puzzle lovers who think regular Connections is too easy. You won’t find it in the NYT Games app. Instead, it lives in The Athletic’s own app, though you can play it for free online if you know where to look.
Here’s the thing about this particular puzzle, which dropped on June 1, 2026: it absolutely expects you to know your baseball rosters from your gym equipment. The theme groupings included parts of a baseball rotation (bench, bullpen, lineup, rotation), gym equipment (elliptical, leg press, medicine ball, treadmill), Philadelphia Phillies players (Marsh, Nola, Turner, Wheeler), and a delightfully cheeky muscle nickname category that required you to add a letter. Flat (lat), spec (pec), squad (quad), and whammy (hammy). See what they did there?
What makes these puzzles so maddening is that they assume a very specific kind of sports knowledge. My husband would ace anything involving Formula 1 in about thirty seconds, while I’d stand there blankly. Meanwhile, I can name every Minnesota Twins player from the last decade, but ask me about Serie A clubs and I’m lost. That’s the beauty and the brutality of Connections: Sports Edition. Your expertise is someone else’s blind spot, and vice versa.
The puzzle creators clearly have fun designing the categories that break people the most. According to the hints published for this particular puzzle, some of the toughest groupings ever created include Serie A Clubs (Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio, Roma), WNBA MVPs (Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles, Stewart), Premier League team nicknames (Bees, Cherries, Foxes, Hammers), and what might be the most absurd category of all: homophones of NBA player names (Barns, Connect, Heart, Hero). Wait, what? You’re telling me “BARNES” becomes “BARNS”? That’s the kind of lateral thinking that keeps puzzle solvers up at night.
If you’re wondering whether this kind of content falls under the umbrella of what’s discussed in puzzle and game journalism, you’re right that it does blur interesting lines between entertainment technology and traditional sports coverage. The New York Times has bet big on games as a way to drive engagement, and the sports vertical adds another layer of complexity to that strategy. It’s worth considering how puzzle games have become a legitimate branch of digital media, not just a gimmick to keep people on a website longer.
The regular Connections game gets plenty of attention in the NYT Games app, but the Sports Edition remains something of a hidden gem, partly because it lives behind The Athletic’s paywall in some form and partly because it simply appeals to a narrower audience. Anyone who’s ever tried to explain why “PITCHER” and “CATCHER” don’t belong in the same category as “SHORTSTOP” and “THIRD BASEMAN” knows the pain.
So the next time you find yourself staring at a Sports Edition puzzle, remember: the person next to you might be breezing through the hockey categories while you triumphantly nail the baseball ones. That’s not a bug. That’s kind of the point.
