Samara

The Palace of Sports named after V.S. Vysotsky holds 5,000 people, and it is the only home Samara's basketball club has known through every version of its own name. The arena outlasts the club's identities: 'Azot', 'Stroitel', 'CSK VVS-Samara', a bankruptcy, and finally just 'Samara' again.

The line back to 1976 runs through Tolyatti, where the club started as Azot before the move to Kuybyshev and a rename to Stroitel. Under coach Heinrich Primatov, Stroitel climbed out of the First League in 1981 and reached the Top League, then took silver in the inaugural Russian Championship of 1992, with bronze following in 1993, 1997 and 1998. The Samara name arrived in 1995. A 2002 merger with CSK VVS produced 'CSK VVS-Samara', a club that carried the derby rivalry with it before folding into bankruptcy in 2009.

What came back later that year kept rebuilding under different labels — 'Samara-SGEU' for a stretch from 2013 — before settling on 'Samara' in 2015. The more recent silverware belongs to the club now: back-to-back Superleague 1 titles in 2019 and 2021, and Russian Cup wins in 2020 and 2022. That run of form carried Samara back into the VTB United League in 2023.

Blue, white and orange remain the colours through all of it. Five thousand seats have watched nearly fifty years of the same club changing shape.