Four words that describe what happens when one team overwhelms another
Each day, the New York Times invites sports fans to find hidden order within apparent chaos — sixteen words waiting to be sorted into four categories that reward both linguistic intuition and athletic knowledge. Connections Sports Edition, born from a partnership with The Athletic, is less a trivia game than a small meditation on how meaning clusters: how words like 'crush' and 'trounce' belong to the same emotional universe, how badminton and squash share more than a building. It is a daily ritual of pattern recognition, humility, and the quiet satisfaction of seeing the board clear.
- Sixteen words sit on the board like a scrambled argument, and the clock of daily reset means today's puzzle will vanish by midnight — solved or not.
- The trap is plausibility: words that seem to belong together can pull players toward wrong groupings, and four mistakes is all that stands between triumph and defeat.
- Today's puzzle #147 spans the full spectrum of sports knowledge, from the blunt poetry of synonyms for a blowout to the arcane rulebook detail of false starts across four different sports.
- Players are navigating the puzzle with shuffled boards, social media share buttons, and tiered hint guides — tools designed to keep the experience competitive but never cruel.
- The game resets at midnight, transforming a solitary mental exercise into a daily shared ritual that friends and strangers compare across feeds and group chats.
The New York Times, in partnership with The Athletic, has built a sports-flavored extension of its popular Connections puzzle — and each day it asks players to do something deceptively simple: sort sixteen words into four groups of four.
The structure is elegant and unforgiving. Categories are color-coded from yellow to purple by difficulty, and every wrong guess costs one of four allowed mistakes. Get a category exactly right and those four words disappear from the board. Run out of mistakes before clearing the board, and the puzzle wins.
Puzzle #147 captures what makes the sports edition distinct. The yellow category — the easiest — groups four synonyms for a lopsided victory: crush, flatten, pulverize, and trounce. Green asks which sports share a racket: badminton, pickleball, squash, and tennis. Blue demands real basketball knowledge, naming the NBA's all-time career three-point leaders: Allen, Curry, Harden, and Lillard. Purple, the hardest, connects football, speed skating, swimming, and track and field through a shared rule — the false start, a violation that can erase an athlete's effort before it truly begins.
Like Wordle before it, the game resets daily and is designed to be shared. Players can shuffle the board, lean on tiered hints, and post their results to social media — turning a private puzzle into a small, recurring act of community. It is available on browsers and mobile alike, slipping easily into a commute or a coffee break, a daily reminder that sports knowledge and wordplay are not so far apart.
The New York Times has released a sports-themed version of its popular word puzzle game, Connections, developed in partnership with The Athletic, the Times' sports journalism arm. Each day brings a fresh puzzle that asks players to find the hidden threads connecting sixteen words into four distinct categories—a task that sounds simple until you're staring at the board and realizing that multiple words could plausibly belong together in more than one way.
The game works like this: you're given sixteen words and asked to group them into four sets of four. Each category represents something these words have in common, whether that's a shared meaning, a connection to a person, a place, or an abstract concept. The puzzle is color-coded by difficulty—yellow is the easiest, then green, blue, and purple for the hardest. Get all four words in a category right, and they vanish from the board. Guess wrong, and you lose one of your four allowed mistakes. Fail to find all four categories before exhausting your mistakes, and the puzzle beats you.
What makes Connections Sports Edition distinct from the original game is its focus on athletic knowledge and sports culture. Today's puzzle, number 147, illustrates this perfectly. The yellow category—the easiest—asks players to identify four synonyms for a decisive, lopsided victory: crush, flatten, pulverize, and trounce. These are words that describe what happens when one team overwhelms another so thoroughly that the outcome becomes almost embarrassing.
The green category shifts to equipment. Four racket sports share a common tool: badminton, pickleball, squash, and tennis. Each requires a racket or paddle to play, a straightforward connection once you spot it. The blue category demands deeper sports knowledge. It asks for the NBA's all-time career three-point leaders: Allen, Curry, Harden, and Lillard. These are names that mean something to basketball fans—players who have spent their careers launching shots from beyond the arc at historic rates.
The purple category, the hardest, requires understanding the rules of different sports. Four sports share a specific rule violation: football, speed skating, swimming, and track and field all have false starts. In each, an athlete or team that begins before the official signal has begun is penalized or disqualified. It's the kind of connection that rewards someone who knows sports deeply enough to recognize what these disparate activities have in common.
Like Wordle, which resets daily with a new puzzle, Connections Sports Edition launches a fresh puzzle each day after midnight. Players can shuffle and rearrange the board to help spot connections more easily. They can also share their results on social media—a feature that has made these games social experiences, turning individual puzzle-solving into a form of friendly competition. The game is playable on both web browsers and mobile devices, making it accessible whether you're at your desk or on your phone during a commute. For those who get stuck, guides like this one offer hints before revealing the full solution, allowing players to choose how much help they want before surrendering to the answer.
Citações Notáveis
The game resets daily with new puzzles, allowing players to share results on social media— Game mechanics
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does the New York Times keep making these word games? They already have Wordle.
Because Wordle is about language and letters. Connections is about meaning and knowledge. A sports version lets them reach people who care about athletics—it's a different kind of puzzle entirely.
So it's harder than Wordle?
Not necessarily harder, just different. Wordle is about deduction and pattern-matching. Connections requires you to think about what things have in common conceptually. You might know all sixteen words and still struggle to see the categories.
What makes the sports version different from the original?
The categories are built around sports knowledge. You need to know NBA players, understand the rules of different sports, recognize athletic terminology. It's designed for people who follow sports closely.
Four mistakes seems generous.
It sounds that way until you're on your third mistake and you're not sure if you're looking at the right connection. The color-coding helps—yellow is usually obvious once you see it—but purple can be genuinely tricky.
Is there a strategy to these puzzles?
Start with what feels most certain. If you're confident about a category, take it. That removes words from the board and makes the remaining connections clearer. Don't force a connection just because three words seem related.
Why partner with The Athletic specifically?
The Athletic is the Times' sports journalism operation. It makes sense to build a sports game under that umbrella. It's a way to engage readers who care about sports and might not otherwise play word games.