They should have done this on NBA all star weekend or whatever. Make it 4 days with multiple games in a day if needed. The reason I don't really like it is because you have teams playing for this cup and then the rest of the teams are just playing normal regular season games at the same time. They shouldn't have made this the way it is scheduling wise. It will confuse fans and they won't really know which is a cup game and a regular season game since you will play a cup game on Sunday night and then Wednesday and Friday you will have a couple regular season games before playing another cup game. It's just a clusterfudge.
Actually, the schedule is set up rather cleverly. There are group games, and once the group stage is done there are tournament games.
It's easy to know which games are group games:
1) Is it November?
If "No", this is not a group game
If "Yes", go to question 2
2) Is it either Tuesday or Friday?
If "Yes", this is a group game
If "No", this is not a group game
The in-season tournament week is also pretty easy.
Sunday, Dec. 3 - No games
Monday, Dec. 4 - Quarterfinal games
Tuesday, Dec. 5 - Quarterfinal games
Wednesday, Dec. 6 - TBD slate of regular season games; all teams not in the tournament will play
Thursday, Dec. 7 - Semifinal games
Friday, Dec. 8 - TBD slate of regular season games; all teams not in the tournament will play, as will the quarterfinal losers
Saturday, Dec. 9 - Championship game
Sunday, Dec. 10 - No games
This is pretty tight and about as far from a cluster as I can imagine. It could have been so much worse.