'A heck of a run': How near-perfect Sheffield Steelers have stayed in Elite League title hunt until the very end

Sheffield Steelers had just been hammered 6-0 at home by Coventry Blaze, leaving them five points adrift of Elite League leaders Belfast Giants, who also had a game in hand.

For many of the 8,000-plus fans in the building – while clearly not mathematically done – the hopes for their team repeating their regular season triumph from 12 months earlier seemed like a long shot.

Fast forward to today and it is a very different picture.

The permutations – as outlined by Steelers’ match-night commentator and highly-regarded statistician Jonathan Fearnley on Twitter earlier in the week – are endless

Essentially, the Steelers still need help from elsewhere but, should they follow up a win in today’s home game against Cardiff Devils with victory on the road at Coventry Blaze tomorrow – while at the same time Belfast drop at least one point in their two games against third-placed Nottingham Panthers – then the title will be the Steelers for a second year running by virtue of having won more games in regulation than their Northern Ireland rivals.

For Steelers’ head coach Fox it would mark another crowning moment – following on from last year’s remarkable treble – and with this year’s play-offs still to come.

But as Fox was at pains to point out this week, it will not matter what happens between the Panthers and the Giants if the Steelers don’t take care of their own business first.

And it isn’t just a case of the Steelers’ organisation showering Panthers’ coach Danny Stewart with gifts in the hope he will do the ‘arch-enemy’ a good turn this weekend.

The Panthers, of course, have plenty to play for themselves, knowing that two regulation wins for themselves over the Giants coupled with two regulation losses for the Steelers would see them crowned champions for the first time since 2013.

As mentioned earlier, the permutations are endless.

As for Fox, the fact his team is still in the title reckoning on the last weekend of the regular season comes as no surprise.

“I have a lot of respect for our entire group,” Fox told The Yorkshire Post. “The Coventry game obviously wasn’t a great look but when you look back at that game it’s definitely not a 6-0 hockey game.

“There are plenty of games that I could say that we won heavily that weren’t reflective of those scorelines either – but sometimes that’s just the way the game works.

“But we’ve got a ton of character in that dressing room. There are some things that happened earlier in the year, some points lost that you look back on and probably wish that you had back.

“For example, we went one (win) and four (losses) after that Champions Hockey League game in Berlin. That was a game where both our goalies get injured, we lose three other players to injury as well and we come out of that game and go one and four.

“And you can’t escape the fact that has had a huge impact on where we are right now in the standings.

“But that’s just this business – these are not meant as excuses, just situations that we would like to have gotten more out of but, sadly, we didn’t.”

The impact of the Steelers’ exhilarating run in the Champions Hockey League is something that can’t be ignored, either – the same as it can’t be for Belfast who suffered similarly on the domestic front during 2023-24 when they were competing in the top-level European club competition.

As a result, it’s perhaps been more of a grind for the Steelers, at times their resources stretched thin through injury and fatigue. In all, during the regular season, they have lost 16 games – 13 in regulation – compared to nine last time out.

Despite being so clearly deflated in his post-match interview following the defeat at home to Coventry on March 1, Fox never lost hope – although he realised his team would need to produce something special – to keep themselves in contention down the stretch.

They did, dropping just the one point in the nine games following the Blaze defeat being as close to perfect as Fox could have hoped for.

“If we go six and two over that stretch this thing is over,” added Fox. “And six and two is still pretty good hockey, so it’s just a testament to our group making sure that if somebody else does win this league, we know that we’ve made them earn it down the stretch here, whatever happens this weekend.

“I didn’t think the game was necessarily up after Coventry because there is always hope until it’s (mathematically) over.

“But we absolutely needed to respond with an elite run of play and a run of games here to put ourselves in this position – that was the most important thing, just to refocus and go one game at a time and hopefully get some help along the way.

“When you play 54 games there are going to be some ups and downs and I feel like for our group not to give up or give in and make sure that we’ve got 17 out of 18 potential points there – that’s a heck of a run to put ourselves in this position.”

​Fox is hopeful over key duo

AARON FOX says key personnel are “trending” the right way as his Sheffield Steelers’ team prepare for their final weekend of the Elite League regular season.

Forward Mark Simpson – such a key player in last season’s treble success – has not featured since sustaining a lower-body injury in the Steelers’ 2-1 loss in overtime to Nottingham Panthers on March 8.

Brien Diffley, another in his second season in South Yorkshire, suffered a lower-body injury in the 4-3 win over Glasgow Clan the following night.

The defenceman returned for last Saturday’s 5-1 win at home to Dundee Stars but then didn’t feature in the 8-4 victory at Fife Flyers the following night.

But head coach Fox is hopeful both may feature at some point this weekend, saying: “Both are questionable and day-to-day still and we’ll just have to see how things look for them both on the morning of the Cardiff game.

“But they are trending positively and we could potentially see both of them this weekend.”