Towering centreman lined up for Sheffield Steelers move

But now they are moving towards signing an even bigger centre...all 6ft 5ins of him.

The EIHL club is confident they will land the towering skater, who has both major junior and American Hockey League experience and has already begun his European hockey experience.

So far, the media spotlight on import skaters who are needed to revitalise the club has been on newly-captured defenceman Kevin Tansey, although import Brett Neumann is also back on the books.

Now Sheffield, who have made it clear they wanted some more size on the roster, could soon be bringing in another new forward with real impact.

The centreman role is all about intelligent transition, protecting the defence, strong puck-handling and winning possession from face offs.

And if Sheffield are going to close the gap on Belfast Giants, they will need someone with vision who can contribute offensively through the middle.

Steelers were 41 goals shy of Giants over the 54 league games; Guildford Flames, Coventry Blaze and Cardiff Devils also scored more goals than Aaron Fox's side.

Coach Fox has spent many hours looking at Sheffield's goal production of 2022-23 and will be hoping to improve on it next season.

He believes players like Robert Dowd, Allen and Neumann scored the amount of goals that the coaching staff had envisaged they would, at the start of the year.

But Fox also conceded: "As a group it was not enough, we turned out to be light down the stretch.

"We scored 190 when we needed a number more like 215 to 220."

The coach tips his hat to Belfast's big championship push in the final months.

"The run of goals Belfast were scoring in the last 15 games..they were winning 8-1 and 7-0, they were smashing teams down the stretch" he recalled.

"For us, the scoring we had in the front half of the year was considerably higher than the second half.

"There is no question we struggled to score goals then and our loss record matched that."

He said it was not always possible for coaches to answer the question of why a team did not score enough.

"In sport, there are small margin percentages, there's the human element of goaltending coming into play, schedules come into play a little bit down the stretch too.

"We have tried to figure out what happened in specific games, we'd watch a video where we scored seven goals and then watched another when we scored two and was there a lot of not a lot of difference in our play?

"Sometimes there wasn't" he said recalling a game when Steelers lost to Cardiff Devils despite heavily outshooting them.

Steelers are making close-season progress in their re-build, though, and could be making an announcement next week.