Basketball team

SKA St. Petersburg

Club · Russia · KHL

«Red-Blues»

479 Matches

303 wins

176 losses

1509–1133 Goals

+376 Difference

3.2 Scored per game

Form W W W L W W

November turns SKA into the club everyone in the Kontinental Hockey League has to answer for: the arena built to match it, the coach — as of 2025, Igor Larionov — inheriting an expectation that a season without the Gagarin Cup counts as a failure.

That expectation has a specific shape. Twice SKA has actually taken the Gagarin Cup, in 2014–15 over Ak Bars Kazan under Vyacheslav Bykov and again in 2016–17 over Metallurg Magnitogorsk under Oļegs Znaroks — and in both finals it was Ilya Kovalchuk who scored the goal that ended it. Under its Soviet name the club reached two Cup finals and took bronze twice, in 1970–71 and 1986–87, and never once climbed higher. The silverware from that era sits outside domestic competition entirely: four Spengler Cups, the last of them in 2010, and a single Motorola Cup in 1983.

The rivalry that defines the club's season is with CSKA Moscow, a fixture known as the Derby of Champions, or the Armed Forces Derby. Games against Dynamo Moscow and Lokomotiv Yaroslavl carry weight too.

The scoring record belongs to Nikita Gusev, SKA's leading points man across its Kontinental Hockey League seasons, a number built well before the club had somewhere new to put it. Since 2024 SKA has played at SKA Arena, which holds 22,500 for hockey, a considerable step up from the 12,300 the Ice Palace offered before it. What hasn't changed is the city that fills either building: Saint Petersburg turning out for a team it calls, simply, the Red-Blues.