KalPa

Sami Kapanen still holds this club, not as a memory but as a majority stake: Kapanen owns 50.5 per cent of KalPa, with Kimmo Timonen taking 8 per cent and Scott Hartnell another 5. Both Kapanen and Timonen went from Kuopio to long NHL careers and came back as owners rather than visitors.

The team itself came from Sortavala, on the other side of what is now the Finnish-Russian border, where it played as Sortavalan Palloseura from 1929. The war took the town from Finland, and in 1945 what was left of the club resettled in Kuopio, taking the name Kalevan Pallo the following year. Black and gold, the colours KalPa still wears, were stitched together from two Sortavala predecessors — black and yellow from one, black and red from the other. Hockey itself did not arrive until 1947, and it took until 1956 for KalPa to push past KuPS as the city's hockey side.

Kuopio's rival is Jukurit, and their meetings are called the Savon derby. The 2024–25 season ended that wait: a Liiga championship, the club's first.

The Wall of Fame at Olvi Areena lists Jouni Rinne, Pasi Kuivalainen, Eero Kilpeläinen and Jari Pulliainen, but it is Kapanen whose name is now on the club's ownership papers as well as its history.