Three games into an 82-game season and the John Tavares discourse is already in full meltdown mode. He's washed, can't handle top-six minutes anymore, and the power play built around him and Matthews is broken. Bench him, bump McKenna up, and move on.
Go look at what actually happened Saturday night before you write that take.
Ottawa beat Toronto 3-2. Stephen Halliday scored the winner in the third, and Linus Ullmark stood on his head with 27 saves in his first game wearing Ottawa's sweater across town. Tough result. But Tavares picked up an assist on Toronto's own power-play goal, the one that put the Leafs ahead 2-1 when Marchenko buried a feed from Darren Raddysh and Tavares. That's a guy doing his job.
What actually sank the Leafs was discipline, and their own coach said so out loud. Jim Hiller didn't blame his captain or his power play. He blamed two penalties in the third period: "I thought the two penalties in the third period really hurt us, took our momentum away and gave them some life and they pushed hard," he said, adding, "Then just some careless penalties." Jack Roslovic and Kirill Marchenko took those minors, and Ottawa made them pay for it. Add in six posts and crossbars that Matthews himself pointed to afterward as rotten luck, and you've got a loss explained without touching Tavares's name once.
This team is three games old, mostly rebuilt, and outplayed Ottawa for long stretches before things came apart late. That's a fair read of one night. It's also exactly why torching a 36-year-old's role off a single loss, in a game he helped set up a goal in, is the laziest conclusion available. If you want to argue Tavares's speed is a long-term problem for this roster, that's a conversation worth having over a longer stretch of games. He wasn't the issue Saturday.
The real issue is sitting in that locker room taking retaliatory penalties in the third period of one-goal games. That's a discipline problem, and it falls on the coaching staff and the players involved. Fix the guys taking careless minors before you go looking for someone to scapegoat on the power play. The players who keep handing Ottawa a man advantage are the problem.
