Breaking: Rival NHL team believed to have begun negotiations with Nylander.

The saga surrounding the Toronto Maple Leafs and restricted free agent forward William Nylander may finally be coming to an end, although it may not be in the way that the Maple Leafs would have hoped for.

Earlier today we reported that the Los Angeles Kings organization had made a two player offer to the Maple Leafs in an attempt to pry Nylander away from the hands of Leafs' general manager Kyle Dubas, but personally I did not see a lot of upside in that deal for the Maple Leafs. Now however there are reports that a rival team has begun talks with Nylander's camp directly and this could lead to a trade that I believe makes considerably more sense for the Leafs' organization.

The Fourth Period's David Pagnotta is reporting that a league sourced has informed him that the Carolina Hurricanes organization remain the favorites when it comes to a potential trade involving William Nylander and it sounds like the process may be significantly advanced. Two additional sources have informed Pagnotta that the Hurricanes have already held talks with Lewis Gross, the agent currently representing Nylander, while one of those sources went on to confirm that the framework of a contract was discussed during those talks. This is obviously a massive update and the biggest break we've heard on the Nylander front since the holdout began. 

Now the fact that the Hurricanes are involved in this comes as no surprise at all, both the Hurricanes and the Maple Leafs have been spotted scouting one another in the past several weeks and there has been rampant speculation that Nylander was the catalyst behind those scouting missions. There's a belief that the piece the Maple Leafs have been targeting is young defenseman Brett Pesce, a deal that would make a ton of sense from Toronto's perspective.

Brett Pesce is currently in the first year of a new 6 year deal that he signed with the Hurricanes, one that comes with a very reasonable cap hit of just barely over $4 million per season. All of those are major positive for the Leafs, they need a defenseman with the kind of ceiling that most pundits Pesce has, they need to save on cap space in the Nylander deal in order to sign Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner to new extensions, and they want young players with several more years of control to build on their young core. Pesce would seemingly provide all of these and it's not difficult to see why Toronto may also have interest in such a deal, even if their priority remains to sign Nylander to a long term contract. 

Stay tuned this one is heating up.