Sports
LEGO® Sports is a discontinued LEGO® theme that ran from 2000 through 2007. The theme focused less on large builds and more on sports action and play: starting with football/soccer, and later expanding to basketball, hockey, and Gravity Games (snowboarding/skateboarding).
What makes LEGO® Sports sets so recognizable is that many of them feature play functions that let you actually “shoot,” “pass,” or “score.” In the early years, the focus was on football, partly because foosball-style games were popular at the time. Thanks to licensing agreements, some sets could also display official sports logos (e.g., NBA/NHL).
Hockey is a fun exception within the line: the first hockey sets even used special figures built from Technic/Bionicle parts instead of regular minifigures, and the line was linked to the NHL. This makes certain sets particularly interesting to collectors looking for unique parts and variations within LEGO® Sports.