Think sideways, not straight, and the words will reveal themselves.
Each day, the New York Times invites its readers into a quiet contest of pattern recognition — a ritual of sorting and connecting that transforms scattered words into meaning. On December 23rd, puzzle number 456 of Connections: Sports Edition asked players to find the invisible threads binding sixteen sports-related words, testing not just what they know, but how they think. It is a small, daily exercise in the very human need to find order in apparent chaos, to discover that things which seem unrelated are, in fact, bound together.
- Sixteen words sit on a board with no instructions beyond the silent challenge to find what connects them — and four mistakes stand between the player and failure.
- The puzzle escalates deliberately, moving from the accessible comfort of words meaning 'rest' to the demanding terrain of basketball anatomy, athlete surnames, and auditory wordplay.
- The purple category — homophones of NBA player names hidden inside ordinary English words — requires players to hold language and sports knowledge simultaneously, listening for echoes others might miss.
- Players shuffle, guess, and occasionally fail, then broadcast their results to friends on social media, turning a private brain exercise into a small daily social ritual.
- At midnight the board resets, erasing the day's puzzle and replacing it with a new set of hidden connections, ensuring the ritual begins again tomorrow.
The New York Times has long understood that a daily puzzle can become a daily habit, and Connections: Sports Edition — built in partnership with The Athletic — is its latest experiment in that tradition. Puzzle number 456 arrived on December 23rd with sixteen words and no instructions beyond the implicit challenge: find the four groups of four that belong together.
The game's elegance lies in its escalating difficulty. The yellow category offered a gentle entry point — words meaning a pause or recovery, like rest, break, and respite. The green category grounded players in the physical world of basketball, asking them to identify the parts of a hoop: base, glass, net, rim. Familiar enough, but requiring a shift in thinking.
The blue category demanded genuine sports literacy. Chiles, Love, Poole, and Spieth share no obvious connection until you realize each belongs to an athlete named Jordan — different sports, different eras, united by a first name. The purple category pushed further still, asking players to hear NBA player surnames hiding inside ordinary words: Barns for Barnes, Flag for Flagg, Heart for Hurt, Quickly for Quickley. It is wordplay and sports knowledge fused into something that rewards both.
The game resets at midnight, and players can share their results — a small daily broadcast of triumph or near-miss. For thousands of people, it has become a five-minute ritual that lives at the intersection of trivia, language, and intuition, a reminder that connection is often just a matter of knowing where to look.
The New York Times has built a daily ritual around finding hidden connections, and now it's doing the same thing for sports fans. Connections: Sports Edition, the latest puzzle game from the Times in partnership with The Athletic, launched to test whether you can spot the thread that binds four seemingly unrelated words together. On December 23rd, puzzle number 456 arrived with 16 words spread across a board, waiting to be sorted into four groups of four.
The game works like this: you're given 16 words and told nothing except that they belong to four categories. Some connections are obvious. Others require you to think sideways, to consider double meanings, alternate spellings, or facts that live just outside the surface of the words themselves. You get four mistakes before the game ends. Each correct group disappears from the board, color-coded by difficulty—yellow for easiest, then green, blue, and purple for the trickiest. It's Wordle's cousin, built for people who think in patterns and associations rather than letter sequences.
Today's puzzle rewarded lateral thinking. The yellow category, the one meant to be most accessible, asked players to recognize words for a pause or recovery period: break, breather, respite, rest. Straightforward enough. The green category shifted to the physical world—parts of a basketball hoop. Base, glass, net, rim. These are the components that make the game possible, the infrastructure of the sport itself.
But the blue and purple categories demanded a different kind of knowledge. Blue required knowing that Chiles, Love, Poole, and Spieth are all surnames of people named Jordan—athletes whose first names connect them despite their different sports and eras. This is the kind of clue that rewards deep sports literacy, the ability to hold multiple athletes in your mind and recognize the pattern that binds them.
Purple, the hardest category, asked players to hear homophones of NBA player names hidden in ordinary words. Barns sounds like Barnes. Flag sounds like Flagg. Heart sounds like Hurt. Quickly sounds like Quickley. These are puns disguised as a puzzle category, wordplay that requires you to know both the sound of a player's name and the sound of an English word well enough to spot where they overlap.
Connections: Sports Edition resets every day at midnight, each new puzzle slightly different in its difficulty curve and the kinds of connections it demands. Players can shuffle the board to make patterns easier to spot, and they can share their results on social media—a small moment of triumph or frustration broadcast to friends. The game has become part of the daily routine for thousands of people, a five-minute brain exercise that sits somewhere between trivia and wordplay, between knowledge and intuition. Tomorrow will bring a new set of 16 words and a new set of hidden threads to find.
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Why does a word puzzle game need a sports edition at all? Isn't the original Connections already challenging enough?
The original Connections is language-based—it trades in words and their meanings, cultural references, book titles. A sports edition shifts the foundation. Now the puzzle assumes you know athletes, team structures, the texture of sports culture. It's not just about finding connections; it's about having the right knowledge to see them.
So it's gatekeeping, in a way. You have to be a sports fan to solve it.
Not exactly gatekeeping—more like specialization. The Times already has Wordle for everyone. This is for people who spend their mental energy on sports. It's the same game engine, but the vocabulary changes. The puzzle on December 23rd wouldn't make sense to someone who doesn't know who Jordan Chiles or Jordan Love are.
That blue category—Jordans—seems almost unfair. How would someone know all four of those names?
It's designed to be the hardest part of a medium puzzle. Yellow is supposed to be easy, green a step up, blue harder still. If you know some Jordans but not all, you might guess three and get stuck. That's where the puzzle gets interesting—it forces you to either know deeply or think creatively about what else the word could mean.
And the homophones? That's pure wordplay, not sports knowledge.
That's the trick of the purple category. It's not testing whether you know NBA players—it's testing whether you can hear the connection between a player's name and an ordinary English word. It's a different kind of thinking entirely. Some people will solve it by knowing the players; others will solve it by hearing the sounds and working backward.