Sports Connections
NHL Connections
Sixteen NHL names. Four groups, and not a number in sight.
Yesterday’s answers
- Brayden Schenn
- Ian Laperriere
- Ivan Barbashev
- Tyler Pitlick
- Adam Graves
- Brian Leetch
- Gary Roberts
- Ken Daneyko
- Alexander Edler
- Brendan Gaunce
- Brock Boeser
- Thatcher Demko
- Blake Wheeler
- Josh Bailey
- Reilly Smith
- Steve Mason
NHL board questions
What kinds of groups does the NHL board use?
Where a player broke in, what he won, when he was born and how long he lasted. Those four families do nearly all the work on this rotation, which gives it a noticeably different texture from the boards that lean on numbers and colleges — and means a name you can place on a hockey roster may still be no help at all.
Are there NHL team groups?
Yes, and they ask a narrower question than they appear to: the group is usually the club a player broke in with, not every sweater he ever pulled on. A much-travelled forward belongs to one debut and half a dozen rosters, so reading the group as "played for" puts the wrong three names beside him.
Which NHL trophies can hold a group together?
The league’s own, named properly rather than described — the board asks you to know the Art Ross from the Hart. Because these have been presented for most of the league’s history, a trophy group routinely sets a current winner beside someone who took the same award decades earlier.
Why are there no jersey-number groups?
Because this rotation is built from a different slice of the record than the ones that use them. Instead it leans on debut clubs, trophies, birth decade and seasons played — and the birth-decade group is the one most likely to look arbitrary until it falls, since two men born months apart can have careers that barely overlap.
Does the board use hockey terms?
No — every tile is a person. There are no groups of rink vocabulary, penalties or equipment; the only words on the board are players’ names, and the thing they share is always something the record can prove about their careers. Milestone groups follow the same rule: twenty seasons, a career points total, a goaltender’s win count — each one a counted threshold from the record rather than a reputation.
Which leagues besides the NHL have a Connections board?
Ten more: MLB, soccer, the NBA, the AFL, the NFL, college football, college basketball, the WNBA, golf and cricket. More NHL games: NHL Wordle, NHL Grid, Build an NHL Player and NHL Career Simulator. NHL Trivia Quiz asks three questions a day. Guess the NHL Team asks for the city of one era’s players. The NHL Ball Knowledge Dive asks for one right name, and the less obvious it is, the more it scores.