New York Times Connections Puzzle Hints and Answers: Sports Version for November 3

The New York Times' "Connections: Sports Version" game presents a unique mental challenge today for puzzle enthusiasts. The game, known as a category matching puzzle, aims to group 16 words into four interconnected sets, maintaining common categories among every four words. This sports version is published by "The Athletic," a platform specializing in sports journalism and affiliated with "The New York Times," and is available for free to play online or through The Athletic app. The puzzles feature a gradient of difficulty, especially with the purple category often requiring deeper thought to identify hidden connections, sometimes relying on modifying letters of names or unexpected words. Here are hints for today's groupings, ordered from easiest (Yellow) to most difficult (Purple):

Group Hints

Yellow Group

Refers to the concept of catching up or falling behind a certain pace.

Green Group

Related to "Beehive State," a well-known nickname for one of the American states.

Blue Group

Associated with specific concepts and statistics in the world of basketball.

Purple Group

Describes a group of prominent American football players (quarterbacks), where the letters of their last names have been innovatively altered to form the words in the puzzle.

Group Answers

• Yellow Group: "Falling Behind" includes the words: drop back, falter, lag, and trail.
• Green Group: "Utah Teams" includes: Cougars, Jazz, Mammoth, Utes.
• Blue Group: "Basketball Scoring Categories" includes: bench, fast-break, paint, and second-chance.
• Purple Group: "NFL Quarterbacks with First Letter Changed" includes: Cove (from Jordan Love), Ellen (from Josh Allen), Mix (from Bo Nix), and Wields (from Justin Fields).