If the standard Connections grid is a brain-teaser, the Sports Edition is a slightly cheekier version of the same challenge: familiar words, familiar names, and just enough overlap to make you second-guess what you already know. Today’s board is a good example. Several entries feel like they belong together on instinct alone, but the puzzle rewards precision. One group is built around meaning, another around a very specific language pattern, another around a cluster of hockey royalty, and the last uses a classic Connections trick where a single word slot changes everything.
Today’s Connections: Sports Edition grid mixes everyday sports terms with proper names and abstract outcomes, asking players to separate words like SUPER, BOWL, SURF, and CURL from surnames such as ORR, LEETCH, COFFEY, and BOURQUE, while also accounting for broader concepts including BUST, FLOP, DUD, and FAILURE, alongside place-based clues like CHICAGO and DALLAS.
Below you’ll find spoiler-safe hints first, then more direct nudges, and finally the full solutions hidden behind a tap-to-reveal box in a light colour (no dark spoiler block). If you’d rather play first and come back, open the official New York Times Connections: Sports Edition in another tab.
How to approach this grid
Start with the category that feels most “sealed”: a set where all four items are the same type of thing and there’s very little wiggle room. Once you lock that in, the board becomes quieter. Then look for a group that shares a clear pattern in how the words are formed. Save the trickiest category for last—Sports Edition often hides its purple group behind a phrase you already know.
Spoiler-free category hints
Yellow: Think of what you call a pick that didn’t work out, a signing that didn’t land, or a season that didn’t meet expectations.
Green: These are sports that become their most familiar names when you add the same three-letter ending.
Blue: Four names from the same position group in hockey, all with Hall of Fame stature.
Purple: A fill-in-the-blank phrase: each word can go before the same final word, and it changes the meaning depending on which you pick.
If you’re stuck after those hints, here’s the most common mistake to avoid: grouping by “sports vibe” alone. A word like BOWL might tug you toward football, while BOX might tug you toward combat sports, but the puzzle isn’t asking you to match leagues or teams in every set. One of today’s categories is almost purely linguistic, and once you treat it like a word puzzle rather than a sports trivia quiz, it becomes much easier to spot.
Another good tactic is to identify your “anchors” first. Proper nouns and surnames are often anchors, because they can’t be bent into multiple meanings the way common nouns can. When you see multiple surnames that feel like they belong in the same sport and era, it’s usually worth testing them together before you spend guesses trying to force a theme out of everyday words. In Sports Edition, that one confident lock often opens the whole grid.
A slightly stronger nudge (still no answers)
- One group is four different ways to say “that didn’t go well” in a sports context.
- One group is four sports that can be turned into “-ing” forms you’d actually hear in conversation.
- One group is a clean set of NHL defence legends—think plaque-worthy careers, not a random mix of positions.
- One group is a phrase puzzle: each word can sit in front of the same trailing word and make a recognisable term.
Tap to reveal today’s answers and explanations (Sports Edition #489)
Yellow — Disappointment: BUST, DUD, FAILURE, FLOP
These are all blunt sports-world verdicts. A “bust” is a player who doesn’t meet the hype, a “dud” is a game or performance that falls flat, “failure” is the broadest label, and a “flop” is a result that never delivers on expectations.
Green — Sports, with “-ing”: BOWL, BOX, CURL, SURF
Add “-ing” and you get everyday sport verbs: bowling, boxing, curling, surfing. This is one of those sets that becomes obvious once you stop trying to keep it inside a single league or competition.
Blue — Hall of Fame NHL defence men: BOURQUE, COFFEY, LEETCH, ORR
Four legendary defencemen with Hall of Fame careers. If the names looked familiar but you couldn’t place the connection, the key is the position group: this isn’t “hockey stars” in general, it’s a very specific slice of hockey greatness.
Purple — ___ Star(s): ALL, CHICAGO, DALLAS, SUPER
Each word completes a familiar phrase with “star” or “stars”: all-star(s), Chicago Star(s), Dallas Star(s), super-star(s). This is the classic Connections trick: treat the word as a plug-in for a shared ending, and the final set snaps into place.
If you solved quickly today, it was probably because the hockey group gave you an early anchor. Once a proper-noun set is removed, the remaining words tend to separate into function and structure more cleanly. The “-ing” sports set is also a good example of why Sports Edition rewards thinking like a puzzle editor: it’s not asking whether something is “a sport”, but whether it becomes a natural sports term once it changes form.
Also read: More daily puzzle guides on Swikblog
