A puzzle designed to humble people who think they know sports
Each morning, the New York Times invites its readers into a small arena of language and memory — a puzzle where sports knowledge becomes the key to order. Puzzle 572 of Connections: Sports Edition asked players to find the hidden logic binding sixteen hockey-related words, testing not just what fans know, but how they think. In an age of fragmented attention, these daily rituals of categorization offer something quietly valuable: the pleasure of pattern, the humility of being wrong, and the reset that comes with tomorrow.
- Puzzle #572 arrived with an implicit warning — without hockey fluency, the board of sixteen words would feel like a foreign language.
- The tension lives in the design itself: words deliberately bleed across categories, tempting players into confident mistakes that cost precious chances.
- Four thematic layers — goal types, Stanley Cup champions, arena names, and hockey slang hiding as food — forced players to shift mental registers with each new group.
- The purple category, the cruelest tier, demanded players see 'apple,' 'biscuit,' 'grinder,' and 'icing' as hockey terms first and food words second.
- Players navigated the chaos by shuffling the board, leaning on instinct, and accepting that four wrong guesses meant the game was over.
- Those who solved it could broadcast their victory on social media; those who fell short were offered the quiet consolation of a fresh puzzle at midnight.
On a Friday morning in April, the New York Times dropped puzzle number 572 of Connections: Sports Edition — and it was built squarely for hockey fans. The game, developed alongside The Athletic, works like the original Connections: sixteen words, four hidden groups of four, and only four mistakes allowed before it's over. The challenge is that words are designed to mislead, pulling players toward plausible-but-wrong groupings before the real logic reveals itself.
This installment leaned hard into hockey's vocabulary and history. The easiest category asked players to name goal types — empty net, even strength, power play, short-handed — the foundational language of any broadcast. One tier up, the green category required recent Stanley Cup knowledge: the Avalanche, Golden Knights, Lightning, and Panthers, the sport's most recent champions.
The blue category moved from meaning to naming, asking players to identify NHL arenas by their shortened corporate titles — Ball, Canadian Tire, Capital One, and TD. Recognizing all four required genuine familiarity with the league's venues.
The hardest category, coded purple, was a linguistic puzzle within the sports puzzle. Apple, biscuit, grinder, and icing are all hockey terms — an assist, the puck, a hard-working forward, and a penalty — but they are also, unmistakably, food. Solving it meant holding two vocabularies at once.
The game's color-coded difficulty structure mirrors the gentle scaffolding of Wordle, guiding players through escalating challenge while keeping the experience shareable. For those who cracked it, the reward was real. For everyone else, tomorrow resets the board.
On a Friday morning in April, the New York Times released another installment of Connections: Sports Edition—puzzle number 572—and this one came with a clear warning: if you don't follow hockey, you're going to struggle.
Connections: Sports Edition is the Times' answer to sports fans who want their daily word puzzle to mean something. Launched in partnership with The Athletic, the Times' sports property, the game works like the original Connections but trades general knowledge for athletic expertise. Players face a board of 16 words and must sort them into four groups of four, each group bound by a hidden common thread. The catch is that multiple words will seem to fit together—but only one grouping is correct. Get all four words in a category right, and they vanish from the board. Guess wrong, and you burn through one of your four allowed mistakes. The game resets daily, and each new puzzle grows incrementally trickier.
Today's puzzle was unmistakably built for hockey devotees. The four categories ranged from the straightforward to the playful: types of hockey goals, the last four teams to win the Stanley Cup, NHL arena names, and hockey terminology that doubles as food. The yellow category—the easiest tier—asked players to identify goal types: empty net, even strength, power play, and short-handed. These are the fundamental vocabulary of the sport, the words commentators use dozens of times per broadcast.
The green category, one step up in difficulty, required knowledge of recent Stanley Cup history. The four winning teams were the Avalanche, Golden Knights, Lightning, and Panthers. For casual fans, this might demand some research or guesswork. For serious followers of professional hockey, these names represent the recent champions—teams that have claimed the sport's most storied prize within the last few seasons.
The blue category shifted terrain entirely. Instead of asking what words mean, it asked what words name. Four NHL arenas were represented by partial names: Ball, Canadian Tire, Capital One, and TD. These are the shortened versions of actual venues—the kind of names that appear on scoreboards and in box scores but require a certain familiarity to decode. A casual sports fan might recognize one or two; a hockey watcher would know them all.
The purple category, marked as the hardest, played with language itself. It asked for hockey terms that are also food items: apple, biscuit, grinder, and icing. An apple in hockey is an assist. A biscuit is the puck. A grinder is a hard-working forward. Icing is both a penalty and, of course, the sweet coating on a cake. This category rewarded not just sports knowledge but the ability to see how sports slang overlaps with everyday vocabulary.
The puzzle's design reflected a deliberate choice: to make the game accessible to its intended audience while remaining genuinely challenging. The color-coding system—yellow, green, blue, purple—guided players through difficulty levels, much like Wordle's feedback system guides guesses toward the answer. Players could shuffle the board to spot connections more easily, and once solved, they could share their results on social media, turning a solitary puzzle into a moment of social proof.
For those who solved it, the satisfaction was real. For those who didn't, the Times offered a gentle reminder: tomorrow brings a new puzzle, and the hints will return.
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does a word puzzle game need a sports edition at all? Isn't the original Connections enough?
The original Connections tests your general knowledge—movies, books, culture. But sports fans live in a different world. They speak a different language. A sports edition lets them play in their own domain, where their knowledge actually matters.
So it's gatekeeping, in a way?
Not gatekeeping—specialization. It's the same reason there are crosswords for lawyers and puzzles for musicians. You're rewarded for knowing your thing deeply.
The hockey theme seems very specific. Why not just make it general sports?
Because specificity is what makes it hard. If you don't follow hockey, you're locked out. That's the point. It's a puzzle designed to humble people who think they know sports.
What about the food items category—apple, biscuit, grinder, icing? That feels like a different kind of puzzle entirely.
That's where it gets clever. It's not just testing hockey knowledge anymore. It's testing whether you understand how language works across different worlds. Can you hold two meanings of a word in your head at once? That's harder than just knowing facts.
Do you think people actually enjoy being stumped?
I think people enjoy the moment right before they understand. The frustration is part of it. You're supposed to feel stuck, then feel the click when it comes together.