A puzzle that speaks directly to people for whom sports is a language
Each morning, a small ritual renews itself: sixteen words appear, and the mind is asked to find the hidden order beneath them. The New York Times and The Athletic have joined their respective fluencies — one in the grammar of daily puzzles, the other in the language of sport — to offer athletes of the intellect a new arena. On September 3rd, 2025, puzzle #345 asked players to navigate the tiers of competition, the architecture of basketball positions, the careers of Notre Dame's WNBA daughters, and the names the professional game has chosen to carry its future.
- Sixteen words arrive each midnight, and the clock resets — there is no carrying yesterday's answer into today.
- The puzzle demands fluency in multiple registers at once: the structural, the technical, the biographical, and the prophetic.
- Four Notre Dame women — Citron, Diggins, McBride, Ogunbowale — surface as a category, asking players to honor careers that traveled from South Bend to the professional hardwood.
- The final group — Bueckers, Flagg, Schaefer, Ward — tests whether solvers have been paying attention to who the basketball world just decided matters most.
- The Times and The Athletic are betting that sports fans want their morning ritual to speak their language, not merely tolerate it.
The New York Times has extended its daily puzzle empire into new territory with Connections Sports Edition, a collaboration with The Athletic that resets every morning at midnight Eastern. Like its predecessor, the game presents sixteen words to be sorted into four groups of four — but here, every thread leads back to athletics.
Wednesday's puzzle, #345, moved through four distinct layers of sports knowledge. The first asked players to name the levels at which competition happens — college, high school, pro, rec — the rungs of a ladder most athletes know by feel. The second tested basketball literacy, hiding the opening words of five classic positions among the sixteen, with only four belonging together.
The third category honored women's basketball with specificity: four Notre Dame alumni who carried their games from South Bend into the WNBA — Citron, Diggins, McBride, and Ogunbowale. The fourth looked forward, grouping the four players selected first overall in the 2025 professional drafts — Bueckers, Flagg, Schaefer, and Ward — the names franchises staked their futures on.
The game is the natural offspring of two institutions that already own their respective spaces. The Times built the architecture of the daily puzzle habit; The Athletic built an audience for whom sports is not pastime but mother tongue. Together, they've made something that feels less like a product launch and more like an inevitability — a morning ritual that finally speaks directly to the fan.
The New York Times has another puzzle waiting for you tomorrow morning. Connections Sports Edition, a collaboration between the Times and The Athletic, launched as the latest addition to the daily word game lineup that already includes Wordle, Strands, and the Mini Crossword. If you're the type who can't start your day without solving something, this one's designed specifically for you—and it resets every morning at midnight Eastern time.
The game works like its non-sports predecessor. You're given sixteen words. Your job is to sort them into four groups of four, where each group shares a common thread. The difference here is that every category, every word, every connection points back to athletics. On Wednesday, September 3, the puzzle asked players to think about the structure of competitive play, the language of basketball, the achievements of specific athletes, and the future of professional sports.
The first category required recognizing the different tiers at which people compete. College, high school, pro, and rec—each one a level where athletes test themselves, from neighborhood courts to stadiums. The second asked you to know basketball positions well enough to spot a pattern: point, power, shooting, small. These are the opening words of five positions—point guard, power forward, shooting guard, small forward, and center—but only four of them appeared in the puzzle. The third category celebrated women's basketball specifically, pulling together four Notre Dame alumni who made it to the WNBA: Citron, Diggins, McBride, and Ogunbowale. These are players who went from South Bend to professional careers on the hardwood.
The final group required knowing who the basketball world selected first overall in 2025. Bueckers, Flagg, Schaefer, and Ward—four names that represent the year's most coveted draft picks, the players scouts and franchises deemed most ready to lead at the highest level. Together, these four categories wove together different dimensions of sports knowledge: the infrastructure of competition, the technical language of the game, the specific achievements of individual athletes, and the immediate future of professional basketball.
The puzzle is part of a broader expansion of the Times' games portfolio. What started with Wordle has grown into a suite of daily challenges designed to occupy a few minutes of your morning or a break in your afternoon. Connections Sports Edition targets a specific audience—people who care about sports enough to want their word puzzles flavored with athletic knowledge. It's a natural pairing: the Times already owns the games space; The Athletic brings sports expertise and an audience of fans who live and breathe the subject. Together, they've created something that feels inevitable in hindsight: a daily puzzle that speaks directly to people for whom sports isn't just entertainment but a language, a way of understanding the world.
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So this is just Connections, but with sports words instead of regular words?
Essentially, yes—but that's more interesting than it sounds. The categories themselves are sports-specific. You're not just grouping random words; you're grouping basketball positions, draft picks, athletes from a particular school. It assumes you know something about sports.
Does that make it harder or easier?
Depends on who you are. If you follow basketball closely, some of these jump out immediately. If you don't, you might get stuck on a category that seems obvious to someone else. That's the puzzle's real tension—it's testing both word knowledge and sports knowledge at once.
Why would the Times partner with The Athletic specifically?
The Athletic is a sports journalism company. They have the expertise and the audience. The Times gets to expand into a niche that Wordle and Connections don't fully serve. It's smart business—you're not cannibalizing your existing games; you're creating a new one for people who want their puzzles to mean something in their world.
Is this the kind of thing people will do every day?
For sports fans, probably yes. It's the same daily ritual as Wordle, but it speaks their language. You wake up, you do your puzzles, and one of them actually requires you to know who got drafted first overall this year. It feels less like a generic game and more like something made for you.