Gornyak

Andrei Kozytsyn signs off on the club's results the way any president would, but the arena in Verkhnyaya Pyshma where Gornyak now plays carries it too. When the Urals Mining and Metallurgical Company brought its junior hockey operation into the city in January 2021, it did not simply relocate a team — it folded a club into the Avtomobilist system as an official farm side.

Before that move, Gornyak was known as something else entirely, based in Uchaly, Bashkortostan. It won the Junior Hockey League championship in its very first season, 2012–13, then stepped up to the MHL the year after. A Supreme Hockey League invitation followed in 2017, and a Gubernator of the Orenburg Region Cup arrived in 2018. The colours changed to red and black to match its new parent in the KHL.

The rivalries carried over too, in a sense — MHL meetings with Stalnye Lisy, the junior wing of Metallurg Magnitogorsk, as do clashes with the likes of HK Norilsk. There is no such edge against the other Yekaterinburg-area sides; they answer to the same UGMK structure Gornyak does now.