TL;DR: While not perfect I think Ao Ashi provides enough individuality mixed with good execution of your standard sports manga tropes to be a must read for anyone who is a fan of the genre while also serves as a great, easy-to-follow introduction for anyone looking to get into it.
As a fan of the genre, two of my biggest issues with sports manga is generally how formulaic they are as well as how hard to follow the action tends to be.
This manga does an exceptional job at handling both of these issues.
Drawing motion is seemingly one of the harder things to do, but something everyone drawing action has to do. Where sports manga tend to deviate though is in the numbers. You won't find detailed eleven on eleven fighting in Dragonball or One Piece, however for every manga about a team sport this is a common occurrence. Naturally drawing a "fight" between 20 people as opposed to two people is a lot harder, so one of my main gripes tends to be that the whole scale picture gets sort of fuzzy when things are moving fast.
Ao Ashi uses almost exclusively an eagle eye's perspective for all of the large motion scenes, along with some of the cast usually explaining the tactics and maneuvers during the scene makes for an extremely accessible and easy to follow disposition. You won't get lost in the build up of blurry scenes, so when the climax finally hits you won't feel lost in how you got there.
Similarly Ao Ashi takes, what-you-would-not-expect-to-be-very-unique-decision-but-sadly-is, a different approach to the setting namely NOT having the setting be in high school.
This does such an immense difference for the suspense and pacing of the story. No more, are the times of set tournament brackets where it's win or go home and your Spin The Wheel options are: Win by demolition, Win as the underdog, Lose in heart breaking fashion or Lose due to injury.
While it is an incredibly sad fact that so many great premises are ruined by the chains of the high school genre, that does not take away from how fresh Ao Ashi felt in regards to the setting.
While the matches themselves are still obviously formulaic, thankfully the over arcing plot is not (at least not compared to most recent sports manga). Needless to say, the outcome of the games is still set to a fifty/fifty of win/loss but where the difference appears is in the consequences of said fifty/fifty. Because the result of a specific game won't affect whether the story continues or not (i.e. getting knocked out of nationals of whatever sport your high school story is set in) the suspense rises since it's not as obvious which games our main cast will win.
Characters are generally just solid, most of them follow your standard tropes for sports manga with a few exceptions. Mainly a few of the side characters show ideas we tend to not find in these types of stories. Notably, characters who find out that hard work isn't always enough and just-because-he's-a-dick-doesn't-mean-he-will-lose. I realize I come off rather negative here, but overall I considered characters to be a strong point. The trope-y ones are done well enough that they're enjoyable despite their one dimension-ness and the more unique characters actually have some solid depth to them, with relatable flaws or otherwise realistic shades.
My main gripes with Ao Ashi have come towards the latter chapters (as of writing this, chapters 230~260) where the pacing has fallen off a cliff with dragged out matches where characters take turn pulling out new superpowers to trump one another for plot conveniences sake. Something that sadly has become a staple of the genre, but I'm hopeful the author will bring us back to his earlier style of pacing where this wasn't as prevalent.
Nonetheless, I've thoroughly enjoyed reading Ao Ashi on a weekly basis and despite it's current slump I intent to keep reading it with hopes that it will return to it's style of the first brilliant 200 chapters.