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.
Why call it the in-season tournament when it’s the beginning-season tournament? This thing started practically the day the NBA started their regular season… isn’t the idea to keep fans from losing interest mid-season? Why not have it around at least December instead?