Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Feb. 23, #518

The Athletic’s daily brain-teaser, Connections: Sports Edition, returned for puzzle No. 518 on Feb. 23 with a quartet of themes that ranged from playful to perplexing. Players were asked to sort 16 clues into four color-coded groups, progressing from the most straightforward yellow category to the notoriously tricky purple set.

The yellow grouping centered on the theme “heckle,” uniting the verbs boo, hiss, hoot and jeer—common sounds from any stadium’s cheapest seats. The green category paid homage to cinema, specifically the Looney Tunes-NBA crossover “Space Jam,” with Bugs, Jordan, Lola and Tweety forming the correct quartet.

Collegiate Florida took the spotlight in the blue tier, where Bulls, Gators, Owls and Seminoles represented the state’s well-known NCAA programs. Finally, the purple tier demanded lateral thinking: each entry was an NFL franchise whose first letter had been swapped. The solutions—bolts (Colts), crowns (Browns), hackers (Packers) and paints (Saints)—proved the day’s toughest test.

Connections: Sports Edition is produced by The Athletic, the subscription sports outlet owned by The New York Times. While the puzzle does not appear inside the NYT Games app, it is playable within The Athletic’s own app or free of charge on the web.