Connections: Sports Edition #773, Nov. 5, 2026: Two Hints per Group, Then the Answers

Thursday’s Connections: Sports Edition from The Athletic and New York Times (NYT) Games is puzzle #773, for Nov. 5, 2026. Two hints per group come first, then the answers in a spoiler section.

You get four mistakes, as always. The rules live on our Connections page.

Thursday’s hints, #773, Nov. 5, 2026

Thursday’s 16 tiles mix places, team nicknames, surnames and one loose word.

• Yellow hint 1: All four tiles are place names, and none of them is the name of a team.
• Yellow hint 2: What links the places is a sporting event that has not happened there yet.
• Green hint 1: Four nicknames of clubs, each one a plural or a pair of words you would see on a jersey.
• Green hint 2: These clubs play baseball in a minor-league classification whose name starts with a number word and a letter.
• Blue hint 1: Four tiles tied to one named athlete, so think about what could follow that person around.
• Blue hint 2: The four are a nickname, an award, a team and a country.
• Purple hint 1: Four surnames, and one of them is spelled exactly like a city.
• Purple hint 2: The people share one job in the National Hockey League (NHL): head coach.

Do not lock in a group on the first three tiles that look alike. Thursday’s board has more than one tile that could sit in two places.

More of Thursday’s puzzles: Connections hints and Wordle hint. Wednesday’s page is still up: Connections: Sports Edition #772. Log your streak on our printable weekly calendar.

Thursday’s answers, #773, Nov. 5, 2026 (spoilers)

Stop here if you are still sorting Thursday’s tiles. One blue tile is a set of initials: the award the league gives its top player of the season (MVP).

• Yellow, Future Olympic Hosts: Brisbane, French Alps, Los Angeles, Utah
• Green, Triple-A Baseball Teams: Chihuahuas, Mud Hens, Space Cowboys, Tides
• Blue, Associated with Nikola Jokić: Joker, MVP, Nuggets, Serbia
• Purple, NHL Head Coaches: Brunette, Maurice, Muse, St. Louis

What each entry is, group by group. We could not reach league or team pages for this puzzle, so these lines go only as far as the game’s own group names:

• Yellow: Four places the game lists as future Olympic hosts.
• Green: Four Triple-A club nicknames.
• Blue: A nickname, an award, a team and a country tied to Jokić.
• Purple: Four surnames of NHL head coaches.

Why Thursday’s traps work

The board is built so that almost every group has a decoy.

St. Louis is the sharpest one. It is spelled like a city, so it pulls toward the place names, and a solver who sees a sports town may also try it beside the club nicknames. It belongs to neither. Two of the place names in the host group are big enough that you may picture their teams first, so read them as places before you sort them.

Three tiles are plain team nicknames in the way they read: Nuggets, Tides and Mud Hens. Only some of them go together, so check what the other tiles in a group have in common before you commit. Joker is the loosest word on the board. As a nickname it could belong to any athlete, which is why the other three tiles in its group matter more than the word itself.

The surnames group is easy to leave for last. Muse and Maurice read like ordinary words or first names, not like people, so they stay unplaced until the other groups are done.

Beebom and Nerdschalk list the same four groups. Puzzle #774 arrives at midnight.