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.
Scheduling is awful this season in general. The Knicks played 5 games in 7 days to start the season, and have already had two more back-to-backs after that.