I will try to explain my thought process behind it.
Having a 10 teams league, there's a pretty clear cut on who's competing and who's not. Most often then not, the 3rd team in each conference is just a ''place holder'' who seems to only favor personal stats.
The first team in each conference having that sort of ''bye'' has not advantage whatsover. (it isn't proven to help the player's performance behind rested or not) and they will, anyway, play against a top team at second round. That bye week, in my mind, needs to be removed.
Without having that sort of competition, the regular season as little to no meaning. Finishing top of your conference gives you no advantage really, as you already have a fair idea on who you are playing in the second round. In the end, the regular season is purely for personal stats and team success comes second, which is obviously, not optimal for the league's interest. So if we try to focus more on the team success instead of going full offense during regular season, I think reducing the number of team going into the playoffs is necessary. That's why I would reduce it to 4 teams
However, we had some particular season where we had a bunch of competing team and maybe cutting it to 4 would be unfair, so that's why we could spice it up a bit. The 4th and 5th seed would play a wildcard game/serie to determine who's playing against the top seed. My orginal idea was to make it 1 game only, but considering STHS is pretty bullshit at time (most of the time lets be honest) 1 game could be very, very risky. The middle ground would be a best of 3, which kinda goes against my thought of removing the ''bye'' round, but I think it's a decent compromise.
Team success wise, I think we now have a reason to finish 1st in the ranking, cause it will ensure you to play against the weakest seed, which benefits your team for sure. There's more to it, but I think that was the main idea behind it.
Oh yeah, all the team out of the playoffs (don't know if we should add the losing team of the wildcard serie) would be eligible for the loto with some maybe adjusted rating, which is kinda nice as well trade pick value wise.