The NOPs column corresponds to CPC timings, which account for the bus arbitration managed by the [[Gate Array]]. The NOP instruction takes 4 cycles. This is the minimum amount of cycles an instruction can take.
Instructions LD (IX+d),r and LD (IX+d),n surprisingly take 5 and 6 NOPs respectively, even though they are both listed as 19 (4,4,3,5,3) cycles in the datasheet. This happens because LD (IX+d),r has one less memory access operation to do compared to LD (IX+d),n as it does not have to fetch the its operand from memory.
Instructions IN r,(C) and OUT (C),r surprisingly take 4 NOPs with CPC timings, even though they are listed as 12 (4,4,4) cycles in the datasheet. This happens because I/O access is not aligned with memory access. On Zilog manual, it is precised that one wait-state TW is automatically inserted after T2 on I/O access.