Almaty

The Almaty city Department of Physical Culture and Sports set up the club on 20 August 2010, taking the place of the disbanded Yenbek in the city's hockey landscape. Officially it is simply HC Almaty; fans and the local media call it the Almaty Tigers, a name echoed by the club's own cheerleading squad, the Tigresses, and since 2017 by a Turan tiger worked into the badge alongside the mountains that stand in for the city.

The team has yet to win the national championship — its closest brush with the title was third place in the regular season of 2019/20 — and its one trophy remains bronze in the 2016 Kazakhstan Cup. Results aside, the fixtures against Astana's clubs, Nomad and Snezhnye Barsy, carry the weight of a derby between Kazakhstan's two largest cities, sharpened further by regular meetings with Torpedo Ust-Kamenogorsk and Saryarka Karaganda.

Coaching changed hands often in the club's first decade — Alexander Vysotsky through 2012, then Oleg Bolyakin — before Evgeny Pupkov, once a Kazakhstan international himself, took the bench in 2021. On the ice, defenceman Rinat Valiyev carried an NHL draft pedigree into the Almaty Tigers' lineup.

Games are played at the Almaty Arena, built as the Almaty Ice Palace and holding 12,000 for hockey — a capacity that puts Almaty among the larger venues in the Kazakhstan Hockey Championship.