Krakow

Kraków's oldest sports club grew out of a city that, in 1906, had barely begun organising itself into teams and leagues, and KS Cracovia was built to cover more than one game at once. The ice hockey section came later, taking shape in 1923, and it played its first official match on 17 February 1924 against AZS Kraków, a 1:0 win that gave the "Pasy" — a nickname drawn straight from their striped red-and-white shirts — their opening line in the record books.

What followed was not a straight climb. The club spent the postwar decades under the name Ogniwo Kraków, a relabelling forced by communist-era restructuring, and slid through relegations in 1955, 1961, 1966, 1970, 1978 and again in 2000. Between the championships of 1949 and 2006 sat 57 years without a title, a gap long enough that winning it back counted as a restoration rather than routine success. From there the club turned into the dominant side of Polish hockey, taking the league in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2016 and 2017, adding three Polish Cups and reaching the group stage of the Champions Hockey League in 2016–17 as the first Polish team to do so.

Ownership has moved more than once in recent years, passing through a 2023 restructuring into KS Cracovia SA and later into the Business Alliance Cracovia holding before control shifted again to a foundation tied to the club's history.

No one is tied to that history more than Leszek Laszkiewicz. He played for Cracovia from 2005 to 2013, won five championships in that span, finished as the leading scorer in Polish league history, and was inducted into the IIHF Hall of Fame in 2025.