How to Play The Chains: NBA

The basics

Connect the Start player to the Finish player. Each consecutive pair in the chain (each “link”) must share an NBA team (any season) or a college. Type a name, pick from the suggestions, and keep building. The moment a legal pick connects to the Finish, the chain auto-completes: you never add the Finish player by hand.

What counts

The NBA has a long, messy history of moving teams, renamed franchises, players who skipped college and stats that were not always tracked. These are the exact rules behind every link and every objective:

• Which players are in the game. Every player who appeared in an NBA regular-season game in 1979-80 or later. Team links only count seasons from 1979-80 onward, so a team a player left before then does not create a link, even though their career stats still count in full.
• Teams are franchises. There are 30 teams, and a franchise is one team no matter how many times it moved or renamed. The Seattle SuperSonics and Oklahoma City Thunder are one team, and so are the Kansas City and Sacramento Kings, the San Diego and Los Angeles Clippers, the Vancouver and Memphis Grizzlies, the New Jersey and Brooklyn Nets, and the Washington Bullets and Wizards. The Charlotte Hornets of 1988 to 2001 count as today's Charlotte Hornets. The New Orleans franchise starts in 2002 and is its own team.
• Traded mid-season. A player links to every team they appeared for, not only the one they finished the year with.
• Colleges. College links are U.S. colleges only. Players who went straight from high school, a prep school or an overseas pro club to the NBA have no college link. Junior colleges count as colleges, and spelling variants of the same school are treated as one school (for example, Berkeley and California).
• Positions. Positions are grouped as Guard, Forward and Center, and players who are listed as a combination (such as guard-forward) belong to both groups. Positions are shown for reference only: no daily objective is based on position.
• Stat milestones. Milestones use NBA regular-season stats only, across a player's whole NBA career including seasons before 1979-80. Playoff, college, overseas and ABA stats do not count, and steals and blocks were not recorded before 1973-74, so career totals for those two stats leave out earlier seasons. A per-game milestone (such as averaging 30 points) only counts a season in which the player appeared in at least 70 percent of their team's games, adjusted for the shortened 1998-99, 2011-12, 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons.
• Awards. Awards count from a player's whole career, including seasons before 1979-80 (Bill Walton's 1977-78 MVP counts, since he played into the modern era). Only official NBA awards count.

Today's objective

Each day's puzzle carries one objective, stated in plain text above the chain. There are five kinds:

• Alternation (“Links must alternate between a shared team and a shared college”) — the required connection type flips every link, so you have to plan two moves ahead. A live pill above the search box always shows what the next link needs. A link connects two consecutive players in the chain to each other, not to the Finish.
• College waypoint (“Your chain must include a Duke alum”) — any valid chain works, but at least one connector (not Start or Finish) must match. The detour is real: par is set longer than the free shortest path to account for it.
• Country waypoint (“Your chain must include a player born in France”) — same detour rule, matched on birth country.
• Stat-milestone waypoint (“Your chain must include a player with 20,000+ career points”) — matched against real career or single-season stat lines.
• Award waypoint (“Your chain must include a Defensive Player of the Year winner”) — matched against real award history.

Scoring

Base score is 1000 at par. Every link past par costs −300, down to a floor of 100. A wrong guess costs −50. If no legal move toward the Finish remains, the chain restarts at −150.

Every connector (not Start or Finish) also adds a rarity bonus on top of the base score, based on its tier, summed across the whole chain:

Each connector also adds a small precision bonus (up to +50) based on exactly how rare that specific player is within their tier, so two Rare pulls almost never score identically.

Rarity tiers

Rarity isn't about how famous a player is in general. It's about how surprising it is that you named this person for this specific connection, compared to everyone else who could've legally filled that same spot. Rarity is revealed after each pick, as the card's finish:

Hard mode

Hard mode is its own daily puzzle, separate from the normal board. Links require true teammates: a shared NBA team in the same season, not just the same franchise at any point in history. There are no college links and no stated objective, just the shortest legal path across a much deeper graph. Hard mode has its own once-per-day lock and streak, tracked separately from normal mode.

Streaks

Each puzzle resets at midnight Eastern and can only be played once per day per mode; that day's locked result is what counts toward your streak and today's score. Current streak is your run of consecutive solved days; best streak is the longest run you've ever put together. Using a hint is practice only, it never touches your streak.