Tayfun

Vladivostok's youth club sits in the Major Hockey League this season carrying something new: for the first time since it was set up, Tayfun reached the Play-In stage in 2025/26, after years of finishing outside the playoff picture altogether. The Harlamov Cup itself has never come near the club, so a Play-In spot counts as the biggest step forward in its history.

The team exists to feed HC Admiral, and everything about it points back to the parent club — down to the colours. Tayfun switched to black and gold in July 2023 specifically to match Admiral, dropping whatever it wore before. Players who go through the Vladivostok side and sign with Admiral afterwards include Arseniy Tsyboya, Ruslan Abdullaev, Ilya Ovechkin, Danil Kolokolcev and Mikhail Bily, though none of them has yet turned that path into a recognised name at senior level.

Away from the league table, August 2026 produced a pair of results that say more about the club's current form than its playoff history does. Tayfun travelled to Bobruisk and won the Cup of the Chairman of the Bobruisk City Executive Committee, beating Dinamo-Shinnik 4:0 in the final. Days later, in Tula, the same squad reached another final and lost it, finishing second to the Academy of Mikhailova at the Cup of the Governor of the Tula Region.

Games against Amurskie Tigry from Khabarovsk carry their own weight locally, billed as the Far Eastern Derby, with a parallel rivalry against Sakhalinskie Akuly from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk keeping the regional calendar sharp between the bigger fixtures. Igor Gavrilov now leads the team from behind the bench, back for another stint after previously coaching the club, in a job that has passed through enough hands — Alexander Gromilin, Alexander Alexandrov, Sergiy Slugin, Vladimir Gordiyuk, Andrey Kuznetsov, Ilgiz Nuriyev among them — that continuity has rarely lasted long. A first Harlamov Cup run, or even a repeat trip past the Play-In stage, is still the thing missing from the record.