I may not get time to flesh these out but I want to make a couple of points about Shore.
Many criticisms of his defensive play are from his early career. Late career Shore was winning Hart trophies for his defensive play. Maybe similar to a Scott Stevens where the career narrative and the timing is important to get right.
Playoffs—during Shore’s peak in the early to mid 30s the Bruins were feeing the pinch of the Depression and didn’t spend on depth. Lack of depth was their downfall in the playoffs with Shore having to play huge minutes.
Also, many of the common measure used to rate players we didn’t see, especially all star and trophy voting, aren’t really able to measure the height of a player’s peak. Part of the case for Shore was that he was the greatest defenceman before Bobby Orr. Not just that he was the best defenceman in X number of seasons. For example, in 1979, Jim Coleman gave his list of top 10 players. He included Eddie Shore and not Doug Harvey, and wrote of Bobby Orr: “Defensively he was no Eddie Shore, but who was?” So if you are going to rate Doug Harvey and Ray Bourque above Shore because you count the awards and then subtract for perceived negatives...the awards may not tell the whole story.