The NBA's 50-Win Club is a big deal

And it was looking rather thin until a victory by the Lakers over Houston on Friday night made the standings look more standard

I am fixated on the phraseology: 50-win team.

It's obviously a simple metric found right in the standings, but winning 50 games in a season is reflexively associated with being a very good team in the NBA.

It's also been a standard that has mattered consistently in MVP voting for nearly 50 years. Since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was voted MVP by his fellow players in 1975-76 despite playing for the 40-42 Los Angeles Lakers who missed the playoffs — and, yes, players really did the MVP voting back then — there have been only four MVPs in the ensuing 48 seasons from teams that failed to win at least 50 games:

🏀 Moses Malone from the 47-35 Houston Rockets in 1978-79.

🏀 Moses again from the 46-36 Rockets in 1981-82.

🏀 Russell Westbrook from the 47-35 Oklahoma City Thunder in 2016-17.

🏀 And Nikola Jokić from the 48-34 Denver Nuggets in 2021–22.

So, yeah.

Fifty wins is significant.

The more modern tenet is that teams have to rank in both the top 10 in offensive and defensive efficiency to be considered truly elite. Entering Sunday's 15-game farewell to the regular season, only four teams could make that claim: Oklahoma City, Boston, Cleveland and Minnesota.

Strangely, though, it's seemingly getting harder to crack the 50-win plateau. There were only six 50-win teams in 2022-23 when injuries ravaged the Western Conference and Sacramento stunningly snagged the No. 3 seed — after a record-setting playoff drought of 16 seasons in a row — at 48-34. And somehow there were only five 50-win teams this season entering Friday's play until the Los Angeles Lakers finally joined the club in Game No. 81 under rookie coach JJ Redick.

“I'm just incredibly proud of our team," Redick said. "It's an accomplishment to win 50 games in the regular season in any year. I think particularly this year, in this Western Conference, it is. And it's a credit to our players."

You have to go back to 1984-85, according to research furnished by my trusty colleague

Keerthika Uthayakumar

, for the last time we only saw five 50-win teams.

And that, mind you, was in a 23-team league.

The NBA has averaged eight 50-win teams per season (8.1 to be precise) in the 30-team era, per Stat Keeks research, dating to the introduction of the Charlotte Bobcats in 2004-05.

Please note that the number of 50-win teams this season can still rise to nine if Indiana (at Cleveland), Denver (at Houston) and the LA Clippers (at Golden State) all win Sunday. Perhaps this story will prove to be prematurely panicky if all three of those teams prevail in their finale … especially since my pal Tim Reynolds of The Associated Press points out that the NBA hasn't featured nine 50-win teams since 10 got there in 2014-15.

I nonetheless felt compelled to spell out where we are going into the final day on the regular season calendar because, again, this is pretty much the first thing I look for when I look at the final standings in any given season. Unless it's a season that featured the Buffalo Braves.

In those cases — duh — where else would anyone look first before refreshing their memories on how the Braves fared?