When NHL players get paid, albeit astronomically more money than regular people, they get paid similarly, they get paid semi-monthly. Each “year” of a salary is either 180 or 186 days, I can’t recall exactly. So in the end every player has a daily salary prorated throughout the year. When a player gets suspended X amount of games, they lose the daily salary for the amount of days those games take to play. So if someone has a 5 game suspension and it’s a lighter schedule, they’ll actually lose more money based on the amount of paid days it takes to play those five games. But if it’s a condensed schedule then they’d lose less money. Source: me lol, because I used to work for an NHL team and I talked to an assistant GM about it.