For June 3, 2026, puzzle No. 618 of Connections: Sports Edition lays out category clues and, if you choose not to play first, the full category answers for Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple.
If you’re staring at today’s Connections: Sports Edition board and hoping someone can throw you a lifeline, you’re in the right place—but there’s a catch.
The bottom of this article includes the answers and hints for the four categories. If you want to solve the puzzle without them, play first. The game for today is available here, and it’s marked as Game No. 618.
Today’s difficulty is listed as 2.5 out of 5.
Yellow: STUFF.
Green: LAKERS.
Blue: DEUCE.
Purple: ECF MVP.
If you’d rather move straight to solving with the categories in hand, here are the complete answers for each of the four colors.
Yellow
Dunking synonyms are DUNK, JAM, SLAM, STUFF.
Green
Teams with 5+ NBA titles are BULLS, CELTICS, LAKERS, SPURS.
Blue
Nicknames of players in the NBA Finals are DEUCE, KAT, SWIPA, WEMBY.
Purple
Words and associations tied to Jalen Brunson include 11, ECF MVP, KNICKS, VILLANOVA.
Connections: Sports Edition is The Athletic’s first-ever game—a daily puzzle built for finding connections between 16 words on the game board. The goal is to group words or objects into four sets of four based on commonalities within each group as quickly as possible. You do it without making four mistakes, and each puzzle has exactly one solution.
The game also makes clear how the difficulty changes as you go: each category is assigned a color that ranges from straightforward (yellow) to medium (green) to challenging (blue) to tricky (purple).
Finally, if you’re curious who’s behind it all: Mark Cooper creates Connections: Sports Edition and is a managing editor for college sports at The Athletic. He was previously the managing editor for breaking news.
The next puzzle will be available at midnight in your time zone, and readers are encouraged to share their scores in the comments.
Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 618 June 3 2026 hints answers Yellow Green Blue Purple
STUFF is literally just “stuff” lol
How is ECF MVP even a “word” like… that’s a whole phrase. I didn’t know Connections could be about acronyms and teams.
I swear it said Deuce are player nicknames in the Finals but then it’s also a LeBron thing? anyway I’m confused. Yellow being stuff feels like it’s cheating
So Purple is Jalen Brunson with 11 and Villanova? That’s wild because I thought the Knicks were more like “5” or whatever, not 11. Also why are there multiple categories that are basically teams/nicknames… I just wanted normal sports trivia. Mark Cooper sounds familiar too, like from when sports news was on TV? idk