Zvezda Moscow

The best season Zvezda ever had came in 2019/20: 89 points from 54 matches, top of the Supreme Hockey League table, a title that gave CSKA's feeder club its only regular-season championship. That same season it added the Silk Road Cup, the league's pre-season tournament.

Zvezda exists to answer a specific question for CSKA. It was registered on 28 May 2015 by the CSKA hockey company itself, and it has never pretended to be anything other than a pipeline. Ilya Sorokin passed through it; Andrei Kuzmenko and Konstantin Okulov did too. Sergey Gersonsky took the first squad through that inaugural 2015/16 season, setting the pattern the club has followed since — win enough to matter, lose players to the parent club when they are ready, start again.

Home games are played in the Small Arena at the CSKA Arena complex, a 2,935-seat rink that makes no claims on the club's identity the way the main bowl next door does for the senior team. Red and blue on the crest are CSKA's own colours, borrowed rather than chosen.

What Zvezda has not done is turn that one title into a habit. A single VHL championship in eleven seasons is a modest return for a club whose job is to keep producing players good enough that its own best years are, by design, someone else's gain.