There is a very interesting and amusing thread by this title over in the baseball forum, where players can rant about the more absurd results the sim produces. A recent loss by a team of mine inspired my to start one here. The story:
My 38-19 team lost to a 4-53 team.
Their starting small forward came into the game at 71% efficiency. Their starting power forward came in at 57%. My players were all at 100%.
We were 19-10 on the road coming into this snakepit.
We outrebounded them by 17. And actually doubled their offensive rebounds, 24-12.
We lost handily by 8.
BELIEVE IT OR DON'T!!!!!

And evidently there have been no posts in the last year...

it's because the ridiculous has become the norm.

Hahahaha! I must agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm still in shock over the loss I described above, but I guess I should get used to such sim shenanigans.

Just had a 57-5 team lose to an 8-54 team, so I know the feeling.

Wow--I thought you of all people had this thing figured out! (LOL). One more: my other team was rolling into the final week of the season at 59-15--and now just lost 4 of 5, 3 of those to teams with losing records. The last one was a 21 point beatdown at home. I guess when the sim decides you're going to lose, you lose. It gets frustrating.

as I said recently in a league chat, this entire thing is about luck.  Literally every possession is like a roll of the dice.  The trick is to minimize the risk & reduce the luck factor.  It's all about probability, & statistical manipulation is how you do it.  There's very little basketball here, it's mostly just names we recognize attached to a bunch of numbers.  And when you're talking about numbers & probability, outliers are certain to occur, and in this sim, those outliers determine the outcome a little too often for my taste.  At the end of the day, it's the best thing out there, however, and the entertainment value is worth the price for me.

Posted by ashamael on 10/14/2015 4:31:00 PM (view original):
as I said recently in a league chat, this entire thing is about luck.  Literally every possession is like a roll of the dice.  The trick is to minimize the risk & reduce the luck factor.  It's all about probability, & statistical manipulation is how you do it.  There's very little basketball here, it's mostly just names we recognize attached to a bunch of numbers.  And when you're talking about numbers & probability, outliers are certain to occur, and in this sim, those outliers determine the outcome a little too often for my taste.  At the end of the day, it's the best thing out there, however, and the entertainment value is worth the price for me.

Absolutely

Oh, I see completely. Today: my 53-21 team outshoots my 32-42 opponent 51% to 40%. We out-rebound him 63-49, we out-FTA him 20-12. Our usually turnover prone Steph Curry commits zero (!) TOs. We win, right? Wrong! Lebron picks up the slack with 11 TOs, the team commits a total of 33, and we lose at home in OT, 109-104. Am I going to stop complaining and just quit this game after the upcoming inevitable "upset" first-round playoff loss? Most likely, yes! The frustration outweighs the fun in this math problem.

Conference Finals - The #1 seeds in each conference (66 and 62 wins) were swept by teams that had losing records against them in the regular season.  I was the 62-win victim.

This just sounds like a bunch of people whining about not getting their way, except for Ashmael, who seems pretty reasonable about understanding what he's signing up for... 

I suppose you all think the 07 SB with Giants and Patriots was the worse thing in history, because the numbers just didn't add up. I suppose you feel that the Red Sox coming back from 0-3 in 2004 was the worst thing ever, because the numbers didn't match up. 

looking at real life examples is a mistake because the sim is not built like reality - in reality stats describe things that have already happened, in the sim stats are supposed to influence what will happen (it's the opposite, there should in fact be less deviation in the sim than there is in real life when in fact there is much much more)

Posted by cejake4 on 11/6/2015 8:56:00 AM (view original):
Conference Finals - The #1 seeds in each conference (66 and 62 wins) were swept by teams that had losing records against them in the regular season.  I was the 62-win victim.

Both were beaten by teams with more experienced and more successful owners who have 52 championships between them.

Posted by copernicus on 11/18/2015 1:51:00 PM (view original):
looking at real life examples is a mistake because the sim is not built like reality - in reality stats describe things that have already happened, in the sim stats are supposed to influence what will happen (it's the opposite, there should in fact be less deviation in the sim than there is in real life when in fact there is much much more)

This.  There should always be some randomness involved, because if there isn't any randomness, the results would get pretty boring pretty fast and nobody new would ever continue to sign up for teams.  However, as I stated above, statistical outliers determine the outcome more often than they should, and my basic reasoning is exactly what copernicus is saying here:

In real life, the results determine the statistics.  In this sim, the statistics are supposed to determine the result.