NBA Connections

NBA Connections hides four groups among sixteen basketball players. A shared jersey number can join stars from different decades; another group may share a college, a franchise or a draft year. They need not have played together. Test each possible link against all four names before submitting the group.

No — that is a different basketball puzzle, and this one never asks you to find a chain. Every group here is four players who independently share one fact: the same number, the same college, the same draft slot, the same franchise. Two men in a group may never have met, let alone played together, and looking for a path between them is the fastest way to spend a mistake.

It does, three ways past the class. The class itself is the common form — four men who heard their names in the same year, from four different teams. Beyond it sit the number one overall picks, four who each went at the top of their draft; the round, four who all went in the second; and the opposite of every one of those, four who were never drafted at all. That last group stays invisible for as long as you are still trying to remember where each of the others went.

As a counted threshold: every player in the group reached the same number of selections or more. It reads as a greatness group but it is arithmetic, which matters when a player you think of as an all-timer falls one short of the line and is therefore not in the set.

Yes, and country occasionally becomes the group itself. The rotation draws on the whole basketball record rather than an American slice of it, so a board can hang on four players who share a country rather than a team. Country describes national association; birthplace can differ.

Ten more: the NFL, MLB, golf, college football, cricket, soccer, the WNBA, the NHL, the AFL and college basketball. More NBA games: NBA Wordle, NBA Grid, Build an NBA Player, NBA Career Simulator and NBA Team Wheel. NBA Trivia Quiz asks three questions a day. Guess the NBA Team asks for the city of one era’s players. The NBA Ball Knowledge Dive asks for one right name, and the less obvious it is, the more it scores.