KooKoo

KooKoo enter the new season having just come within a game of the title they have never held. In the 2025–2026 final, Tappara beat them 4–3, a series settled by a match lasting 129.54 minutes, the longest final in Liiga history.

KooKoo first won promotion to the SM-liiga in 1987, the year the club took its current name, only to be relegated in 1990. Worse followed in 1997, when the team dropped to the third tier. It took the formation of Mestis in 2000, with KooKoo among its founding members, to give the club a stable route back up. That route was completed in 2014, when KooKoo beat Jukurit 4–1 in the Mestis final and returned to the top division for the 2015–2016 season.

Otto Paajanen wore the captain's armband through much of that climb and the years that followed. Defenceman Mikko Outinen's number 36 hangs retired, and the KooKoo Hall of Fame, opened in 2015, holds names such as Esa Sirén and Heikki Kokki among its inductees.

The club plays in black, orange and white, and its supporters, who call themselves KooKoolaiset, rally under the banner Yksijoukkue — One Team. The name itself comes from the call of the cuckoo, a piece of onomatopoeia adopted in 1987 to replace the original Kouvolan Kiekko-65, chosen when the ice hockey sections of Kouvolan Pallonlyöjät and Sudet merged on 3 November 1965.