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.

Connections: Sports Edition features a fun mix of categories today. The blue and purple answers jumped out at me, and hint — the purple ones might have done so because I live in Seattle. Read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That’s a sign that the game has earned enough loyal players that The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by the Times, will continue to publish it. It doesn’t show up in the NYT Games app but now appears in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can continue to play it 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: Getting ready to play.

Green group hint: Not South Carolina.

Blue group hint: Think Tour de France.

Purple group hint:  Long-gone teams.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Approach to a game.

Green group: North Carolina teams.

Blue group: Bicycle brands.

Purple group: Former NBA team names.

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 approach to a game. The four answers are plan, scheme, strategy and tactic.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is North Carolina teams. The four answers are Hornets, Hurricanes, Panthers and Wolfpack.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is bicycle brands. The four answers are Giant, Huffy, Mongoose and Schwinn.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is former NBA team names. The four answers are Bobcats, Nationals, Royals and Supersonics.

Overwatch launched a new game mode, Stadium, last week as part of its 16th season. After playing the mode ahead of launch for a week, I called it «the first thing that has felt truly new in the game since it came out.»

Well, it seems like players are enjoying the new taste. In a Director’s Take blog post, Blizzard announced Thursday that, in the first week after its launch, about half of all the play hours in Overwatch were spent in Stadium. «While we often see a big spike in play time shortly after a sparkly new event launches, play time in Stadium has been a bit stickier,» the game developer said.

That’s good news for a game facing stiffer competition since December, largely in the form of Marvel Rivals, which was a smash hit of a hero shooter right out of the gate. Earlier this year, Overwatch introduced a new perks system that provided more progression within each match, which at the time felt like a major change. While that shifted up gameplay for the game’s core quick play and competitive modes, it wasn’t nearly as radical a departure for Overwatch 2 as Stadium. 

Blizzard said the first week of launch led to 2.3 million Stadium matches (which translates to 7.8 million hours), more than doubling Overwatch Classic’s popularity. 

Game Director Aaron Keller said in group interviews ahead of the Stadium launch that the Overwatch team was investing heavily in Stadium, including the mode having its own separate resources and a fresh influx of new heroes and maps every season. We’ve already seen a couple of hotfix patches to address overpowered builds and heroes.

We’ll get the first big taste of that commitment to Stadium when Freja joins the chaos in the midseason patch. But that’s only the start. 

After some time in Stadium, I noted that some team strategies had different viability than in mainline Overwatch. In particular, rush compositions felt a bit overturned, thanks largely to a combination of available heroes (especially tanks) and more compressed maps. I hoped that future hero additions would prioritize different macro strategies, «enabling more ranged compositions with heroes like Sigma and Zenyatta or dive compositions with Winston.»

As it turns out, Sigma and Zenyatta are joining the mode in season 17, along with Junkrat. That’s a significant boost to ranged damage. Then in season 18, Stadium will add Winston, Sojourn and Brigitte, which should complement the mode’s existing heroes like Genji and Ana for more powerful dive setups. 

Sure, it’s still just matchmaking, so most people are just picking whatever hero they feel like playing, probably without much thought to overall team synergy, but I like that the devs are giving us the ability to pursue those types of strategies, even if it’s rare for it to come together. And the new heroes are coming alongside new maps and modes, unranked crossplay, and an eventual draft mode over the next several seasons.

Overall, it’s a bunch of good news for a mode that seems to be a hit. I’ve been playing the mode semi-frequently since launch (not wanting to neglect the standard modes so I can play Freja, who feels like the most fun new hero since Kiriko) — the mode varies from thrilling to rage-inducing, but it’s certainly never boring. The updates announced Thursday are a strong signal that Overwatch is poised to keep the momentum going. 

Anthropic’s Claude generative AI model can now spend more time searching for answers to your queries — if you pay for the right plan.

Claude can also integrate with other apps, including PayPal, Cloudflare, Jira and Confluence, with more expected soon, Anthropic announced in a blog post on May 1. Anthropic also expanded the ability to access web search to include all paid plans.

This year, the AI industry has been in a race for new and more useful features, and research is a big part of it. Google’s Gemini has a tool called Deep Research that is available to all users for free. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Deep Research mode is available to anyone with a paid plan. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

These deeper research tools can search the web and pull together more complete answers to your queries. The AI models will often cite the source of information, although you should still verify it because of the risk of errors known as hallucinations. 

Regardless of what AI tool you use, «the thing about this is you’ve got to check the sources. It’ll make up the sources too,» Alex Mahadevan, director of the MediaWise media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, told me. 

Anthropic said its improved research function can spend five to 45 minutes finding and reviewing sources. Those sources can come from internal sources — like your own documents or apps you’ve connected — or from external sources it finds on the internet. The model breaks requests down into smaller parts and handles each separately, then compiles a full report. 

The advanced research function is available in beta on Anthropic’s Max, Team and Enterprise plans. The Max plan starts at $100 per month. Anthropic said it will soon be available on the more affordable Pro plan, which costs as little as $17 per month, depending on how you pay.