The sports analogy is not great, because tech companies can't trade engineers to fill a need, and there are no multi-year contracts, so any engineer can quit at any time.
There's also no hard industry-wide salary cap. With the salary cap, the best way to maximize your overall team performance is to get superstars under contract when they're young and underpaid, because a team can only afford a few veteran superstars. Also, sports teams have a hard roster limit, whereas big tech companies can hire as many employees as they like. The analogy breaks down in so many ways.
The analogy is with the dichotomy in incentives between teams that have to win now versus teams trying to build for the future. Some companies need you to hit the ground running because they are presently making no money and need to get a product out the door as quickly as possible. Some companies are going to make more money than God next year no matter what and are more concerned with ensuring they'll still be in a dominant position ten years from now. That affects the kinds of candidates they're looking to hire in terms of narrow specialists versus generally talented people, independently of any constraints in the candidate pool and compensation markets.
Again, the sports metaphor breaks down, because winning and losing is a zero-sum game, whereas companies aren't necessarily playing a zero-sum game. Moreover, a team's draft position is inversely correlated with its record, so there's an incentive to "tank" to get better draft picks. ("Rebuilding" often means getting rid of your expensive best players and intentionally losing for a while.) No such analogous situation exists in business, it's just an arbitrary effect of how sports leagues are organized. It's actually designed that way to encourage competitive parity among teams, prevent any one team from dominating forever.
There's also no hard industry-wide salary cap. With the salary cap, the best way to maximize your overall team performance is to get superstars under contract when they're young and underpaid, because a team can only afford a few veteran superstars. Also, sports teams have a hard roster limit, whereas big tech companies can hire as many employees as they like. The analogy breaks down in so many ways.