Multiple words might seem to belong together, but there's only one correct grouping
Each day, the New York Times invites sports fans to find hidden order among apparent chaos — sixteen words, four invisible threads, and the quiet satisfaction of pattern recognition. Connections Sports Edition, born from a partnership with The Athletic, transforms athletic knowledge into a daily ritual of grouping and guessing. Today's puzzle, number 556, asks players to move from the familiar boroughs of New York sports culture through gym equipment and Celtics lore, arriving finally at the delightful ambiguity of breakfast words that secretly speak the language of the game.
- Sixteen words sit on the board like suspects in a lineup — any one of them could belong with another, and the wrong guess costs you dearly.
- The puzzle's sharpest trap lies in language that lives two lives at once: a 'pancake block' and a 'cup of coffee' sound like Sunday morning, but they're hiding on a football field and a baseball diamond.
- Players shuffle, second-guess, and lean on cryptic hints — 'The Anomaly,' 'Breakfast of Champions,' 'Train This' — each clue generous enough to tease but not enough to rescue.
- With only four mistakes allowed before the board goes dark, every confident tap carries the weight of a final answer.
- At midnight the slate clears, a new puzzle surfaces, and the cycle of collective solving and social sharing begins again — Wordle's restless spirit alive in a stadium.
The New York Times, in partnership with its sports journalism arm The Athletic, has built a word puzzle for the fan who thinks in box scores and jersey numbers. Connections Sports Edition gives players 16 words and asks them to sort those words into four groups of four, each bound by a hidden theme. Difficulty rises through a color spectrum — yellow to green to blue to purple — and four wrong guesses end the game entirely.
Today's puzzle, number 556, opens gently with New York sports teams: the Knicks, Liberty, Nets, and Rangers, representing the city's basketball, women's basketball, and hockey franchises. The green tier moves into the gym — foam roller, jump rope, medicine ball, resistance band — the honest vocabulary of athletic preparation. Blue sharpens into specificity, grouping four words tied to Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum: his jersey number zero, his team, his college Duke, and his nickname The Jays.
The purple category is where the puzzle earns its reputation for difficulty. 'Cup of coffee,' 'goose egg,' 'hashmark,' and 'pancake block' are all legitimate sports terms — a brief major-league stint, a zero on the scoreboard, a grid line, a flattening block in football — but they arrive dressed as a breakfast menu, daring players to see through the disguise. The hints offered were deliberately oblique: 'New York, New York,' 'Train This,' 'The Anomaly,' and 'Breakfast of Champions.'
When the puzzle is solved, players share their color-coded results on social media, turning a solitary game into a communal one. Tomorrow, at midnight, the board resets and the search for hidden connections begins again.
The New York Times has launched a sports-focused version of its popular word puzzle game Connections, developed in partnership with The Athletic, the Times' sports journalism arm. Unlike the original game, which draws from general knowledge, this variant is built specifically for people who follow sports closely—and today's puzzle, number 556, leans heavily on New York sports culture.
Connections works like this: you're given 16 words and asked to find four groups of four words that share a hidden connection. The catch is that multiple words might seem to belong together, but there's only one correct grouping for each set. The game color-codes its difficulty levels—yellow for easiest, then green, blue, and purple for hardest—and you get four mistakes before the puzzle ends. If you guess wrong, it counts against you. If you get all four words in a category right, they disappear from the board and you move on.
Today's puzzle centers on four distinct themes. The yellow category, the easiest, asks you to identify New York sports teams: the Knicks, Liberty, Nets, and Rangers. These represent the city's basketball, women's basketball, another basketball franchise, and hockey presence respectively. The green category shifts to physical training: foam roller, jump rope, medicine ball, and resistance band—equipment you'd find in any serious athlete's workout routine. The blue category takes a sharper turn into specificity, grouping words associated with Jayson Tatum, the Boston Celtics star: the number zero (his jersey), Celtics (his team), Duke (his college), and The Jays (a nickname). The purple category, the trickiest, uses sports terminology that doubles as breakfast references: cup of coffee (a brief stint in the majors), goose egg (a score of zero), hashmark (a grid pattern, also called a hash), and pancake block (a type of block in football).
The game resets daily at midnight, with each new puzzle designed to be progressively harder. Players can shuffle the board to help spot connections, and once they solve it, they can share their results on social media—a feature that's turned Connections into a social experience, much like Wordle before it. The Sports Edition specifically targets fans who live and breathe athletic knowledge, making cultural references and technical jargon part of the puzzle's fabric. For those playing along, the hints were deliberately cryptic: "New York, New York" for the teams, "Train this" for equipment, "The Anomaly" for Tatum (a reference to his nickname), and "Breakfast of champions" for the sports terminology with double meanings. Tomorrow brings a fresh puzzle and another chance to test your sports knowledge.
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
So this is a word puzzle game, but specifically for sports fans. What makes it different from the regular Connections?
The core mechanic is identical—find four groups of four words with hidden connections. But where the original might ask you to name countries or book titles, this one assumes you know your sports. Today's puzzle is basically a love letter to New York sports culture and basketball terminology.
The Jayson Tatum category seems oddly specific. Why would a puzzle include a single player's references?
That's where the difficulty comes in. The purple categories are designed to be tricky, and grouping things by association with one person—his number, his team, his college, his nickname—that requires you to know not just who he is, but the details around him. It's the kind of thing that makes you feel clever when you get it.
The breakfast category is clever. "Cup of coffee" meaning a brief stint in baseball, "goose egg" for zero. Are those terms actually used in sports?
Absolutely. They're real sports slang, but they have literal breakfast meanings too. That's the puzzle's trick—it's not just testing whether you know sports, it's testing whether you can hold two meanings in your head at once and recognize the pattern.
How many mistakes do you get before you lose?
Four. So you can afford to be wrong a few times, but not many. It keeps the pressure on without making it impossible.
And it resets every day?
Every day at midnight. That's what keeps people coming back. You get one shot at today's puzzle, and then tomorrow there's a new one waiting.