Chicago Cubs Rumors: 3 outcomes of a Kris Bryant trade

Mid-decade contention

As of now, the Cubs only have a year or two left in their championship window. With superstars like Bryant and Javier Baez only under team control for a couple more years and an aging core, the time to win another championship seems like now or never (with never meaning until the Cubs rebuild again).

If the team moves their prized third baseman, the current window would almost certainly be over.

And at the pace the team is moving at, the first year or two of the decade will be the end of the current window of contention. Therefore, the Cubs will need a few years to stockpile draft picks and rebuild. It’s likely that the team won’t be contenders again until 2026 at the earliest.

But if Bryant is moved over the 2019-20 offseason, it would mean that the rebuild could start as early as the 2020 season (provided that they move other pieces and acquire draft picks).

As a result, the Cubs could already be a contender again in the mid-2020s.

That could be good and that could be bad.

The bad side of that would be that the Cubs would be abandoning their current window and moving on from the 2016 core entirely.

The good side of that would be that the Cubs would be able to contend sooner in the 2020s.