Sheffield Steelers 5 Coventry Blaze 0: Kevin Tansey rewarded for his forward thinking as Steelers keep rolling

With forwards Robert Dowd and Marc-Olivier Vallerand ruled out through injury, defenceman and stand-in captain Tansey was an obvious candidate for head coach Aaron Fox to move up the line.

The 31-year-old Canadian was known to have played as a forward during both his junior career and in the American Hockey League prior to moving to Europe and showed he was still capable of fulfilling a more advanced role.

After what Fox admitted was a sluggish start by his team at the Utilita Arena, it was Tansey who broke the deadlock when he opened the scoring just after the halfway mark, driving down the middle from inside his own zone before firing past Mat Robson in the Blaze goal.

It opened the floodgates, with Daniel Leavens benefitting from good work by Max Golod to double the lead just over a minute later at 31.17.

Only two more minutes had passed when the lead increased further, Mitchell Balmas firing home from the top of the left circle at 33.10 on the power play.

With less than two minutes of the period left, Sacha Guimond joined the play to receive a pass from Balmas and make it 4-0.

Any faint hopes the Blaze had of a comeback were soon ended in the third when Tansey finished off a three-man move to make it 5-0 at 43.05.

“I felt once we got rolling we were hard to stop,” said Fox. “We played relentless two-way hockey and it was good to see Tans score. We moved him up front and he goes coast to coast and get us rolling there - then we scored a few in a short amount of time there and turned the game on its head.

“Tans has played some forward in the AHL and also growing up so I knew it was an option and we’ve talked about it plenty of times.

“He’s played as a forward on the power play for most of the time he has been with us, too.

“He’s a bit of a different old-school-type forward where he’s going to run around and bang and get to the hard areas and create space for his linemates and then he got rewarded with two big ones tonight which was great to see.”