I'm not sure it's that simple.
The prevailing newspaper narrative certainly seems to be that he stepped aside due to nerves, but it's not like they just made it up - Irvin said so himself, and in doing so he was paraphrasing McNeil.
Then in the fall of 1954, McNeil retired due to nerves, and straight from his own mouth he confirmed it.
The picture from Ferguson seems to indicate an ankle injury, but we can only speculate on its severity. Perhaps it was so bad that he couldn't play - that doesn't mean that the prevailing narrative wasn't also true. The evidence seems to corroborate that it was. (the retirement article actually refers to him playing on a badly injured ankle - whether it's the injury from the 1953 playoffs, who can say)
McNeil aside, the point that you're really trying to make, though, is that "both are equally valuable", those being first-hand, contemporary accounts and after-the-fact scouting decades later. I would strongly disagree. Look at the Eddie Shore discussion from months ago. Mike looked at a very short highlight reel of Shore, came to the conclusion that he was not a very smart player, who thought only of smashing into other players and attempted to have us rank him accordingly. That's looking at 1930s hockey and expecting the players to live up to modern standards, which is just not fair. It does not take into consideration what kind of defense tactics were the most effective or appreciated in that time, and most egregiously, it assumes that these were routine moments instead of high-action moments cherrypicked by a 1930s editor for a hype video - you don't see Eddie Shore highlight videos detailing the dozens of times he may have taken guys out of the play in much more subtle ways, because no one wants to see that (except us 90 years later), and you don't have hours of footage where you can point to dozens of instances of someone less flashy like, say, Cy Wentworth, being so much smarter and more effective at defense. A 1980s Scott Stevens highlight reel would look very much the same, but we have much more information about Stevens' that tells us that these are just brief moments in a very long and effective career. We don't have that for Shore. It's great that we have a very brief look at him to apply the eye test, but let's weigh it accordingly with the eye tests from the people who rated hockey's best defenseman and indeed, best player, so many times. The argument against his style of play, intentionally or not, ends up being "but he played so long ago", just framed in a seemingly more intellectual way.
Same concept with Ullman - to a different degree. The first hand accounts and the results captured by numbers definitely paint the picture of a real catalyst in both the offensive and defensive zones.
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