Assessments vary so widely for coaches.
For example, take Kent Douglas's assessment of the coaches he played for. He said Eddie Shore was the best coach he ever played for, and Punch Imlach was the worst. (He also said Turk Broda, his tier II junior coach in the Toronto system, was completely clueless and only had his job because he was a former Leaf great.)
Eddie Shore was actually the owner of the Springfield Indians, not the game day bench coach. He always hired someone else to coach the games (including Imlach for one season). But Shore ran the training camp and practices, designed the systems that the team played, and he spent time coaching players 1-on-1 to improve their weaknesses. So he did have a reputation in his day as a coach, even though he isn't listed as the coach of record in the history books.
Shore had a reputation for knowing more about hockey than anyone else in the world. He had spent his career as a player trying to master the game, and he continued doing so as a team owner. His emphasis on teaching balance and using all edges as a skater was well ahead of his time, and he always spent the first week of training camp on skating fundamentals. Which frustrated some players, especially those who didn't skate to Shore's standard and didn't think they needed to learn anything. Shore himself was a marvelous skater who was in great shape even in his 50s and 60s, and he could skate and demonstrate all the drills better than any of the players. When he was in his mid-60s, his son Ted filmed him demonstrating all his skating training and drills. Now that's one piece of lost hockey film that I'd love to see.
Brian Kilrea said Shore constantly emphasized that the puck moved faster than you could skate, and drilled the team on moving without the puck and passing to the open man. He said the Springfield team passed twice as much as their opponents, and they didn't dump the puck in. During the 1972 Summit Series, Bill White told reporters that as far as he was concerned, the Russians weren't doing anything new. It was all stuff that Eddie Shore had taught them in Springfield.
Shore specialized in cheaply acquiring players who were distressed assets, coaching them up and improving them, and then getting a good return for them. As the rink owner, he could and would spend an hour or two a day using the ice to work with an individual player, and he would do so for any player who asked. I read an account from the mid-1940s of a player who had graduated junior hockey, wanted to make it in senior hockey, and he came to Shore for help. Shore spent an hour on the ice with him each day for a week before the player took the train home. I don't remember the name now but I looked up the player and he was a low scoring high PIM winger in junior who didn't make it as a senior and probably had no chance. But Shore put in the work with this young man who had asked for help.
He was especially good with defencemen, which isn't surprising considering he was an all time great himself. Douglas, White, Ted Harris, Bob McCord, and Dale Rolfe were all Shore projects. He got a lot of press for turning Douglas around, because it was so fast and dramatic, and because the Leafs sent him five players for Douglas after only one season.
Shore's individual coaching for Douglas included:
- Getting his weight down. Shore concluded that Douglas was drinking too much in the way of liquids, including water, milk, and pop (so the papers said). Douglas was leaner and quicker after cutting back on his water consumption.
- Controlling his temper. Shore convinced Douglas that he didn't have to retaliate immediately and get a penalty. There would always be an opportunity later when he could get his revenge cleanly and avoid the penalty box. (The papers were happy to point out the irony in Eddie Shore teaching this lesson.)
- Improving his balance when engaging the opponent. Shore taught Douglas to use a half-hit to bump the opponent off balance and take the puck, rather than laying out a full bodycheck that would take him out of the play with the opponent.
- Douglas said Shore had dozens of other little tricks that he passed on.
On the other hand, despite Shore's thorough knowledge of hockey and ability as a skills coach, he was also a tight-fisted owner, which alienated his players. And his abrasive manner and personal eccentricities put many players off as well. Even his supporters like Douglas, Kilrea, and White said you had to ignore his eccentricities, and then you could learn a lot from him.
Punch Imlach, on the other hand, was not a teacher of hockey at all. As a player, he never played at a higher level than senior hockey. As a coach, he didn't even run practices in Toronto, he delegated that to some of the senior players. Per Punch and his supporters, his main skills were man management and team motivation. Douglas and other detractors said Imlach was a self-promoter and a fraud who knew how to work the media but didn't know hockey. In their view, Imlach took all the credit when the team won, and blamed the players when they lost. Douglas considered that the players basically coached the team themselves, and Imlach had nothing to do with their success. He described Imlach's coaching as being limited to saying "Next line."
Imlach also alienated two young star players in Frank Mahovlich and Carl Brewer. They should have been the foundation for Toronto's post-dynasty success, along with Dave Keon.
So how do you rate Eddie Shore versus Punch Imlach as a coach? Is it all about the NHL and winning the Stanley Cup, or do Shore's player development and innovation count for anything? Was Imlach actually a great leader and motivator, or just great with the media? Did Imlach make his mark on the Leafs with his style of play? Or did he just continue the Maple Leaf way that had been established throughout the organization for years, including their sponsored minor hockey and junior hockey teams?
And then consider we have zero film or video of Imlach's Quebec Aces, and zero film or video of Shore's Springfield Indians.
It could be a fun project, but I wouldn't expect anywhere near the amount of consensus there has been for the projects on players.