Lokomotiv Kuban

The EuroCup final of 2012–13 still stands as the club's highest point: Lokomotiv Kuban beat Bilbao Basket for the title, with Richard Hendrix taking the Finals MVP award. Three seasons later the team reached the EuroLeague Final Four, finishing third after beating Laboral Kutxa for bronze — the deepest run any Krasnodar side has made in Europe's top competition. Domestically the club has taken the Russian Cup twice, in 2000 and in 2017–18.

None of that was built where the club started. It was formed in 1946 in Mineralnye Vody under the name Lokomotiv, and spent decades away from the top of Russian basketball before a 2003 move to Rostov-on-Don, playing as Lokomotiv Rostov. The decisive shift came in the summer of 2009, when Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin took the club to Krasnodar and renamed it Lokomotiv Kuban. The Krasnodar Krai government put up half the budget and paid for a new arena, giving the team the kind of facilities that top-flight European competition required and that Rostov-on-Don could not offer.

That arena, Basket-Hall, holds 7,500 and remains the only top-tier basketball venue in Krasnodar, so the club has no local derby to speak of. Its rivalries are drawn instead from the league table, chiefly with CSKA Moscow and Khimki in VTB United League and EuroLeague play. Fans and local media know the team as the Krasno-zelyonye, the Red-and-Greens, a name that follows the red, green and white on the shirt.

The roster that reached the Final Four carried players such as Victor Claver, Anthony Randolph and Marcus Williams, while Nando de Colo passed through Krasnodar before his MVP season at CSKA. Beneath the first team, the SShOR-Lokomotiv-Kuban academy keeps producing local talent for a club still built, at its foundation, on that same railway name it carried out of Mineralnye Vody.