The atmosphere is not that of a normal elimination tournament with a group stage. The excitement of the football/soccer tournaments is that all the games happen in rapid succession and teams have to adapt and face-off against surprising dark horse type teams.
The court design is a nice touch but the scheduling not being in a playoff-like mode of games every 2 days is robbing us from some real sports drama and excitement.
I wonder why they didn’t do 5 groups of 6 teams.
Having even number of teams in groups would allow all teams in a group to have games on the same day. (Who cares about conferences?)