Franchise mode: AHL players without contract

It may be too late now, but in future Franchises you play, you fix that by going into a franchise to see who all is assigned to your team (write the list on a piece of paper, or a text doc), then go to the rosters menu in the main menu and dump everybody from your AHL team that you don't have control over and don't want control over, and replace them with people you want in your organization. Sign them to one-year contracts in the "edit player" screen, and moving forward always ensure that, at the start of every season, you have enough players to fill both your NHL and AHL rosters or else the game will auto-assign players to fill out your AHL roster, and you'll have to sign them in order to move them off your rosters.
It's frustrating and stupid that there isn't a way to remove them without signing them, it's incredibly stupid that we're limited to only 50 contracts (making it an arduous process to sign and trade the many guys on your roster that aren't in your organization, because you have to sign, sim a few days, trade them, then sign more, and of course your reputation takes a hit for immediately trading guys you just signed...) As long as we're under the cap, I don't see why it matters. But... that's what's happening. There's enough guys on every team's AHL affiliate to field a game-day roster, and in order to do that, the game assigns several guys to each team that isn't signed.