Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Hockey fans, today’s Connections: Sports Edition is for you. All four categories are hockey-related. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Fire it into the net!

Green group hint: Lord Stanley’s hardware.

Blue group hint: Where hockey teams play.

Purple group hint: Put the biscuit in the basket.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Types of hockey goals.

Green group: Last four teams to win the Stanley Cup.

Blue group: NHL arena names.

Purple group: Hockey terms that are also food items.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is types of hockey goals. The four answers are empty net, even strength, power play and short-handed.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is last four teams to win the Stanley Cup. The four answers are Avalanche, Golden Knights, Lightning and Panthers.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is NHL arena names. The four answers are Ball, Canadian Tire, Capital One and TD.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is hockey terms that are also food items. The four answers are apple, biscuit, grinder and icing.

Would you like some cheese with that iPhone? If a new rumor is true, the big new bold color for Apple’s next flagship phones will look more like red wine than bright orange.

The latest rumor comes from Macworld, which cites a leak from an unnamed source close to the supply chain. According to the leak, the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max will have a dark cherry color option. The source also said that those new flagships, as well as Apple’s first foldable phone, will launch in September. 

According to different reports over the past several months, the foldable might be named the Ultra, the Fold or even the iFlip.

Apple has not officially announced anything — not the iPhone 18 Pro or Pro Max, nor the foldable. There have been tons of rumors about specs and release dates, but nothing has been verified.

A representative for Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CNET is keeping up with all the latest iPhone 18 Pro rumors, including release dates, design, colors, specs and Apple’s first foldable (and don’t always believe your eyes).

Read more: I Turned My iPhone 17 Pro From Cosmic Orange to Pink

Apple is always changing colors for its top iPhone models. You can see all the colors over the years here.

The rumor about the iPhone 18 Pro coming in dark cherry doesn’t come out of the, ahem, blue. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported several weeks ago that Apple was considering red as its new vibrant color. Last year, for the iPhone 17 Pro, the new breakout color was cosmic orange.

Macworld’s source also said that Apple is toying with two other colors for the iPhone Pro roster — light blue and a dark shade of gray. The source said Apple is also considering a silver variation of the current iPhone 17 Pro.

Macworld’s source listed these Pantone color codes as being used internally by Apple: Light Blue (Pantone 2121), Dark Cherry (Pantone 6076), Dark Gray (Pantone 426C) and Silver (Pantone 427C). Note the absence of a solid black hue, as a previous rumor suggested.

Foldable, not so colorful?

The Macworld source said the foldable might have fewer color options than the iPhone Pro 18 and Pro Max. Macworld said Apple engineers are experimenting with a classic silver-and-white model and indigo, like that of the deep blue of the iPhone 17 Pro.

Take it with a grain of salt, but Macworld’s source last year did confirm the cosmic orange that eventually was the iPhone 17 Pro color splash.

If you want an app you built to be downloadable from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, it has to pass a slew of criteria, including safety standards. 

But a new report on Wednesday alleges that Apple and Google broke their own rules by promoting «nudify» apps that are outlawed in their app store policies.

The Tech Transparency Project, part of a nonprofit tech watchdog, first revealed in January that Apple and Google app stores had over 100 nudify or undressing apps. These are apps with the sole purpose of taking images of people, usually women, and editing them to appear to be that person without clothing, creating what’s called nonconsensual intimate imagery. Many of these apps use generative AI to create deepfakes. 

Apple removed some of the prohibited apps at the time. But many are still out there, as evidenced in a subsequent investigation.

In April, TTP found that Apple and Google still allowed users to search for a number of troubling keywords, including «nudify,» «undress» and «deepnude.» After a deep dive on the top 10 apps across both app stores, TTP found that 40% of the apps advertised themselves as able to «render women nude or scantily clad,» according to the report. 

The new report also found that Google and Apple actually promoted such apps in their stores, increasing their visibility, with Google in particular creating «a carousel of ads for some of the most sexually explicit apps encountered in the investigation.»

Read More: How to Keep Kids Safe Online? Europe Believes Its Age-Verification App Is the Answer

Apple and Google both have language in their policies that prohibits apps with «overtly sexual or pornographic material» (Apple) and «sexually suggestive poses in which the subject is nude, blurred or minimally clothed» (Google). And they’ve both enforced these policies in the past — particularly by going after porn apps. 

But Apple and Google make money from app developers by running advertising and taking a part of paid app subscriptions. Analytics firm AppMagic found that these «nudify» apps were downloaded 483 million times and made more than $122 million in lifetime revenue.

«This revenue stream may be why the two companies have been less than vigilant when it comes to nudify apps that violate their policies,» TTP writes.

After news broke this week, Apple told Bloomberg News that it removed 15 of the reported apps. Google confirmed it removed seven. Apple also said it blocked several of the search terms TTP flagged in its report. Apple and Google did not immediately respond to CNET’s requests for comment and any updates since Wednesday.

Nonconsensual graphically sexual content is a growing issue, due in part to AI. We saw in startling clarity how apps with AI can be used to make this illegal and abusive content at the beginning of the year, when Grok users made 1.4 million sexualized deepfakes over a nine-day period. 

Some US senators at the time called on Apple and Google to remove Grok from their app stores, but neither removed it. 

We learned this week that Apple privately reached out to Grok to express its concerns about its abusive AI capabilities and threatened to remove it. Grok is still available in the Apple and Google app stores and is still reportedly able to create abusive AI sexual images, despite the company saying otherwise.