Players picked up during the expansion draft were announced as protected, from what I saw.
The difference with this draft against the others is that (from what I gather) contracts roll over with this draft - if you pick up a guy in the other drafts, I'm fairly certain that the contracts get renegotiated. So if someone didn't like a high salary cap number, they'd wait until the next draft and hopefully pick up a guy then.
Still, I don't know why we didn't take AJB, especially when he was still there in round 2.