It's probably their free agent status that's the problem. Open the players up in the editor, and check to see if their NHL League Rights are set to "None" or "Free" - if it's Free, it needs to be changed to None (on a regular player, they'll be None until they go through a draft unclaimed, at which point they switch to Free, but the player creator starts all new players out with the Free status, since they'd be perpetually unsignable otherwise if you didn't manually assign their rights.)
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