Krasnoyarsk

The Platinum Arena, holding just over 7,000, has been the club's stage since the Sever years, and it is there that the Frosty Derby against Norilsk draws the sharpest edge of any fixture on the calendar.

The club grew out of a hockey section at the Krasnoyarsk Metallurgical Plant in 1973, and the plant is still traceable in the old nicknames the team once carried, Krylatye and Pernatye, long before Sokol became the settled name. Money trouble forced a rebrand to Energia in 1995, and under that name the team ran out its Open Championship of Russia campaigns until the whole operation folded in 1997. It took until 2003 for the club to come back, restored as Sokol and starting again in the First League, a rebuild that carried it into the VHL by 2011.

Those early Soviet years left their own mark in the record books: silver in the USSR Second League's Zone East in 1980/81 and again in 1991/92, with bronze either side of them in 1979/80 and 1986/87. The First League produced a similar pattern of near-misses in the Siberia-Far East zone at the end of the 2000s, before the 2022/23 VHL final brought the club its biggest result yet.

Alexander Semin is the name Krasnoyarsk hockey people reach for first. He came home to play for Sokol in 2012–13 and again in 2017–18, seasons removed by then from his NHL and KHL peak, and he never really left afterwards: Semin now serves as the club's president.