It's because real life SRS does not follow a normal distribution. When they used "a mean of 2010_SRS and a standard deviation of 3.082", that was inaccurate--the standard deviation is correct, but the distribution should be unsymmetrical. There should be a much longer and thicker tail toward the mean of NBA teams, and a steeper decline toward the other side... in other words, a distribution skewed towards the mean....

Really interesting stuff here. I think that besides the 180 anomalies in 10,000 seasons (the undefeated and the fully defeated), the numbers work out like one might expect. It's strange, though, that there are so many zeros in the rank-order draws. In fact, double-digit champs were divided at the 16-mark, the number of teams in the playoffs per year, and the triple-digit champs were divided at the 9-mark, pretty close to the number of higher seeds in the playoffs each year (8).

Anyways, it's funny how there are so many 82-0 and 0-82 seasons in the simulations! Perhaps the sims can't properly take into account teams not giving it their all every time out?