Cricket team

Belye Medvedi

Club · Russia · MHL

«White Bears»

402 Matches

237 wins

165 losses

1302–1060 Goals

+242 Difference

3.2 Scored per game

Form W W L W L L

Valeri Nichushkin wore Belye Medvedi black and white before Dallas and Colorado ever knew his name, and the same is true of Evgeny Kuznetsov, Nikita Nesterov, Yakov Trenin and Vitali Kravtsov — a production line out of Chelyabinsk that has fed the KHL, the NHL and the Russian national team for over a decade. The club exists because Traktor Chelyabinsk needed a place to grow its own, turning the old farm side Traktor-2 into a proper junior outfit in 2009 and folding it straight into the newly created Minor Hockey League as one of its founding members. The bear in the name and on the crest is borrowed from the parent club, and so is the strict black-and-white kit, summed up by supporters in the hashtag "only black and white."

They play out of the Traktor Arena, sharing the 7,500-seat rink with the senior side, which gives the junior team's biggest nights an atmosphere smaller MHL clubs rarely get. On the ice, the peak came in 2014/15, when Belye Medvedi topped the MHL regular season and took the Golden Division title the same year they won bronze in the Kharlamov Cup playoffs — one of four bronze finishes for the club, the others coming in 2010, 2018 and 2024. The pattern in the semi-finals became almost a ritual: three times the run ended against Stalnye Lisy, who then had to be beaten again in the third-place match to take the medal home.

That opponent is not incidental. Stalnye Lisy, the junior arm of Metallurg Magnitogorsk, sits close enough down the road that their meetings are billed as the Ural Derby, and it is against them that Belye Medvedi have measured themselves most often when medals were on the line.

Latest results

All matches

12 Sep	MHL	Avto A	0:3	L
9 Sep	MHL	Loko-76 A	1:2	L
8 Sep	MHL	Loko-76 A	9:3	W
28 Aug	Club Friendly	Tolpar A	1:2	L
6 Aug	Club Friendly	Sibirskie Snaipery Novosibirsk H	6:4	W
5 Aug	Club Friendly	Kuznetskie Medvedi A	5:1	W