The NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for April 14, No. 568, arrived with four fresh groups and a familiar warning for players: this one depends a lot on which sports you know best. The puzzle was published by The Athletic, not in the NYT Games app, and it can be played for free online or through The Athletic's own app.
The yellow group centered on baseball pitching arm slots. The answers were overhand, sidearm, submarine and three-quarters. Another group was boxing gear, with gloves, mouthguard, shorts and speed bag fitting together cleanly once the category clicked.
The blue group leaned on a name trick that made the clue feel familiar before the pattern snapped into place. The hint was like Gosling or Reynolds, but their first name becomes a last name, and the theme was ____ Ryan. The answers were Buddy, Matt, Nolan and Rex. That set rewarded anyone who noticed the shared surname pattern rather than the sports reference alone.
The purple group pushed the puzzle farther out, with hoops groups, with a twist as the hint. The theme was NBA teams, with the last letter changed. The altered team names were Bucky, heap, spurt and sung. As with many Connections: Sports Edition boards, the hardest part was not knowing the sports term itself but seeing how the game was bending it.
Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times, and its puzzles are often tougher than they first look. This one showed why: a player who follows baseball closely might move quickly through the yellow set, while someone more fluent in the NBA could be the first to crack purple. That unevenness is part of the appeal, and part of the frustration, of the game.
For April 14, the board gave players a straightforward sports vocabulary test before slipping into wordplay and team-name distortion. That is usually where the puzzle gets interesting, and where the connections answers matter most: not just what the words are, but what kind of sports brain is likely to see them first.
