Sheffield Steelers hit reboot mode in bid to end inconsistent Elite League campaign on high
ALL season, head coach Aaron Fox has believed that the Sheffield Steelers team he pieced together last summer was capable of winning.
This weekend in Nottingham, they have one last chance to prove him right.
Having come up short in the Elite League regular season title race - Belfast Giants winning the most-coveted crown of the UK top tier for a fifth time in six seasons - and then seeing their Challenge Cup hopes ended over two legs by arch-rivals Nottingham Panthers, it has come down to 120 minutes of hockey - possibly - for the Steelers to make it a memorable season for the right reasons.
Today sees them come up against a Manchester Storm team attending their first-ever play-off finals weekend with a place in Sunday’s final at stake against Cardiff Devils or Glasgow Clan, who are first on the ice today at the National Ice Centre in Nottingham.
It would be easy to suggest that given the aforementioned Giants and Panthers are not part of this year’s grand finale having exited last week at the quarter-final stage, that the semi-finals have opened up kindly for either the Steelers or Cardiff - the two higher seeds this weekend.
But that would be a dangerous assumption to make.
At times, this season, Manchester and Glasgow have proved obdurate opponents for the Steelers - inflicting losses on Fox’s team which proved to be costly in the long run when it came to the league title.
Both teams split their respective head-to-head series in the league equally with the Steelers, but it is only Manchester for now that Fox and his players will be thinking about.
Three weeks ago after a chastening 5-0 defeat in Cardiff came hot on the heels of a first loss of the season to second-bottom Dundee Stars on home ice, Fox let rip, blasting his team as “soft and lazy”.
Since then, he has seen the kind of performances that were sadly lacking in both those games, plus at other crucial times in the season when trying to claw back ground on eventual champions Belfast.
But Fox is certainly more buoyant than he has been since that Wednesday night in South Wales and heads into this weekend confident his players can emulate what they did two years ago when they completed the treble by beating the Giants 3-1 in the playoff final.
To do so, though, does depend on which version of his team turns up today
“We set our standard pretty high here and our goals are to win everything every year,” said Fox. “And when you don't do that there's going to be disappointment.
“The Challenge Cup one was pretty disappointing as we played so well for the majority of that 120-minute semi-final, it was just that a tough start early on in the first game put us in a hole that we didn’t end up climbing back out of ultimately.
“You get into overtime and that's all it is, one moment, one lost coverage, one one-on-one battle you lose and it ends up in your net.
“The league, we pushed hard for for a long time after that stretch we had after Christmas put us in a really tough spot and then you know obviously after we lost that that second double-header to Belfast we could kind of see the life come out of our group a little bit and we were a little vanilla for a good stretch of games there.
“But I thought that Glasgow weekend was a good reboot for us, scoring goals at home against them and then going up there and playing a good, solid road game.
“I know we lost that game eventually in overtime but we kind of built into the Guildford weekend where I thought we were close to our best for 120 minutes and, hopefully, you know we've got two more of those in us.
“Confidence and consistency - if there was one thing this team lacked a little bit this year was just that consistency because when we're good, we're elite and when we aren't good, we're very average.
“And in years past, or the year that we won the league, the downside of our game was still winnable, good hockey. The downside of our game this year has been us looking like a completely different hockey team.
“I don't think there's going to be anything left to save it for here and I feel like guys are pretty confident at the moment.
“But a lot of what goes into this is going to come down to are we going to out-compete them? Are we going to be willing to block those shots in key moments? Will we finish in certain areas of the ice when we get those scoring chances? Just such small margins. There is just not a lot of room for error. But we've had a good week here and we’ll be ready.”