Only one grouping is correct, and the puzzle makers know you'll be tempted.
Each midnight, a new grid of sixteen words appears before millions of players, inviting them to find the hidden order beneath apparent chaos. The New York Times Connections: Sports Edition — puzzle number 568 — asks its daily audience to sort boxing equipment, pitching styles, famous Ryans, and disguised NBA teams into their proper groups before the clock resets again. It is a small ritual, but rituals need not be grand to matter; the daily return to this modest challenge speaks to something enduring in the human desire to make sense of scattered things.
- Sixteen words sit on a grid like a scrambled world, and the player has only four mistakes before the puzzle closes its doors.
- The trap is deliberate — words bleed across categories, and the puzzle makers design the confusion with care, especially as difficulty climbs from yellow to purple.
- Today's puzzle stretches across boxing gyms, baseball mounds, a shared surname, and NBA franchises whose names have been quietly altered by a single letter.
- Players shuffle, theorize, and deduce — some finishing in minutes, others surrendering their lunch break to the grid without resolution.
- At midnight the board wipes clean, and the cycle begins again, with shareable results binding strangers across social media in a spoiler-free collective experience.
Every midnight, sixteen words arrange themselves into a grid and wait. The New York Times Connections: Sports Edition has become a daily ritual for millions — not unlike Wordle, but more demanding. Where Wordle asks for a single word, Connections asks you to find four hidden groupings, each one correct in full or not at all. Four wrong guesses and the puzzle is over.
Puzzle 568 draws from several corners of the sports world. One category gathers boxing equipment — gloves, mouthguard, shorts, speed bag. Another collects the arm angles a baseball pitcher might use: overhand, sidearm, submarine, three-quarters. A third category unites four famous people who share the surname Ryan — Buddy, Matt, Nolan, and Rex. The fourth and trickiest group requires noticing that Bucky, Heap, Spurt, and Sung are NBA team names with their final letter changed — the Bucks, Nets, Spurs, and Suns in disguise.
The game was built in partnership with The Athletic and runs on both browsers and phones. Categories are color-coded from yellow to purple, signaling difficulty without revealing content — a small mercy that tells you how hard to think, not what to think about.
The puzzle's cruelty is its overlap. Words seem to belong in multiple places at once, and the makers exploit that ambiguity deliberately. The yellow category offers confidence; the purple one demands the kind of knowledge that separates the casual fan from the devoted. Hints exist for those who want a nudge. Full answers exist for those who've stared long enough. And at midnight, without ceremony, the grid resets — and the ritual begins again.
Every morning at midnight, a new puzzle appears on screens across the internet—sixteen words arranged in a grid, waiting to be sorted into four groups of four. The New York Times Connections: Sports Edition is the latest iteration of a word game that has become as much a part of the daily routine as coffee for millions of players. Unlike its sibling Wordle, which asks you to guess a single word, Connections demands that you find the hidden thread connecting seemingly unrelated terms, then do it three more times before the puzzle resets.
Today's puzzle, number 568, tests whether you know your way around a boxing ring, a baseball diamond, and the rosters of professional basketball. The game itself is straightforward in concept but devilish in execution. You're given sixteen words. Your job is to identify which four belong together, remove them from the board, and repeat until the grid is empty. Get all four words in a category correct and they vanish. Guess wrong and you lose one of your four allowed mistakes. The stakes are small but the satisfaction of solving it is real.
The New York Times launched this sports-focused version in partnership with The Athletic, the publication's sports journalism arm. It works on both web browsers and phones, making it accessible whether you're at your desk or killing time on the train. Each category is color-coded by difficulty—yellow for the easiest, then green, blue, and purple for the trickiest. The colors are a mercy; they tell you nothing about what the categories actually are, only how hard the puzzle makers think you'll find them.
Today's four categories span different corners of the sports world. One group consists of equipment you'd find in a boxing gym: gloves, mouthguard, shorts, and a speed bag. Another pulls from baseball, specifically the different arm angles a pitcher can use to deliver a ball—overhand, sidearm, submarine, and three-quarters. A third category plays with a common first name: Buddy, Matt, Nolan, and Rex all precede the surname Ryan, each one a notable figure in sports or entertainment. The final group requires a different kind of thinking. Bucky, Heap, Spurt, and Sung are NBA teams, but each one has had its last letter changed, turning the Bucks into Bucky, the Nets into Heap, the Spurs into Spurt, and the Suns into Sung.
The game's appeal lies partly in its daily reset. There's always another puzzle tomorrow, another chance to prove you know your stuff. Players can share their results on social media without spoiling the answers for others, creating a shared experience across the internet. Some people solve it in minutes. Others spend their entire lunch break staring at the grid, rearranging words, testing theories, and occasionally hitting the shuffle button just to see the words in a different arrangement. The game allows for both strategies—methodical deduction and intuitive leaps.
What makes Connections harder than it first appears is that multiple words often seem like they could belong together. The puzzle makers know this. They exploit it. A word might fit into two or three different categories depending on how you're thinking about it, and only one grouping is correct. This is where the difficulty levels matter. The yellow category is usually something straightforward, a gimme to build confidence. By the time you reach purple, the connection is often obscure or requires a specific kind of knowledge—the kind that separates casual players from those who live and breathe sports trivia.
For those who want to solve it themselves, hints are available before the answers. For those who've already spent too much time staring at the grid, the full solutions appear at the end of the article. Either way, the puzzle will reset at midnight, and a new set of sixteen words will take its place. The game continues, day after day, testing the knowledge and patience of millions of players who have made this small daily ritual part of their routine.
Notable Quotes
The game is all about finding the common threads between words, with difficulty increasing daily as new puzzles reset after midnight— Mashable India
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a word puzzle game need a sports edition at all? Isn't the original Connections already challenging enough?
The sports edition exists because the New York Times owns The Athletic now, and they wanted to create something that spoke directly to sports fans. A regular Connections puzzle might ask you to group types of cheese or characters from a TV show. The sports version assumes you know who Nolan Ryan is, or that you understand baseball pitching mechanics. It's the same game, but the vocabulary is different.
So it's not actually harder, just more specialized?
Exactly. The difficulty comes from whether you have the knowledge, not from the puzzle structure itself. Someone who watches baseball every day will breeze through the pitching category. Someone who doesn't follow sports might struggle with it. The color coding—yellow, green, blue, purple—that's the real difficulty measure.
What's the trick with the NBA teams having their last letters changed? That seems almost unfair.
It's a wordplay category, which is common in Connections. The puzzle makers are testing whether you can recognize something familiar even when it's been slightly distorted. You know the Bucks, the Nets, the Spurs, the Suns. But when you see Bucky, Heap, Spurt, and Sung, your brain has to do a little extra work. That's what makes it purple—the hardest difficulty.
Do people actually share their results on social media?
All the time. The game lets you share a grid of colored squares that shows your solving pattern without revealing the answers. It's become a status symbol of sorts—solving it in one try, or admitting you needed all four mistakes. It's the same social element that made Wordle so popular.
What happens if you get stuck?
You get four mistakes before the game ends. You can shuffle the board to see the words in a different arrangement, which sometimes helps you spot a connection you missed. But if you can't find all four categories, the game is over. Then you wait until midnight for the next puzzle.