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NBA Connections: Why the Obvious Grouping Is Usually the Trap
Why the most visually obvious shared trait in a Connections puzzle is often a decoy, using a real Statzle NBA Connections board as an example.
Connections gives you 16 players and four mistakes to find four hidden groups of four. The part that actually decides most runs isn't recall -- it's whether you can tell the difference between a category that's really there and one that just looks like it's there because three or four names happen to share something incidental.
A real board, broken down
Statzle's NBA Connections for July 26, 2026 had four groups: Portland Trail Blazers, San Antonio Spurs, Miami Heat, and 10,000+ Career Points. Three team-based groups and one stat threshold, sitting in the same 16 names.
That mix is common for NBA Connections specifically, and it's exactly the shape that creates the puzzle's real difficulty. With three of four categories built around a single franchise, a player who happens to have logged real time with two of those three teams over a well-traveled career is a live trap -- they could plausibly slot into either team's group depending on which stint you're thinking of.
Why the stat-threshold group is usually safer to find first
On a board shaped like this, the 10,000+ Career Points group is often the more reliable one to lock in early, precisely because it doesn't compete with the team groups for the same players the way two team groups compete with each other. A player's career scoring total doesn't change depending on which of their team stints you're picturing -- there's no ambiguity to trip over.
Locking that group in first does double duty: it's one confirmed group, and it also removes four names from the pool, which makes the three team-based groups easier to disentangle since fewer players are left who could plausibly belong to more than one of them.
Reading "one away" correctly
If a guess comes back "one away," the instinct is often to reconsider the whole group of four. Don't -- three of your four picks are confirmed correct. The fix is to swap exactly the one player you were least sure about, not to rebuild the group from scratch. On a franchise-heavy board like the one above, the player worth swapping is almost always the one whose most famous team isn't actually the one you guessed for.
Sources
- Statzle's archive of past NBA Connections puzzles