Winter sports drone on like overworked space heaters, filling the calendar with meaningless victories and meaningless losses and meaningless games on the horizon.

Rarely is February a decisive month for hockey and basketball teams, and yet last week, sandwiched between Groundhog's Day and Valentine's Day, Minnesota's prominent winter sports teams did varying amounts of damage to their various fortunes.

From Thursday night through Saturday night, the Gophers basketball team, Timberwolves, Wild and Gophers men's hockey team played seven games. Before Thursday, those four teams had a combined record of 74-48-9. In seven games from Thursday through Saturday, those four teams went a combined 0-7.

Here's an assessment of the damage each team sustained in a premature Valentine's Day massacre:

Timberwolves

At 13-15, the Wolves continue to outpace expectations, and their two losses at home, on Friday to the defending NBA champion Mavericks and Saturday to Jeremy Lin and the Knicks, don't alter that story line.

Losing to the Mavericks when Dirk Nowitzki is healthy is to be expected. Losing to the Knicks on a night Lin made eight of 24 shots from the field is less forgivable, but the Wolves drawing the fourth-largest crowd in franchise history (20,232) is further testament to their resurgence as a franchise.

The Wolves have celebrated their rebirth by noting all of the ways they are outpacing the abysmal teams that represented them the past two seasons. It's time to forget the recent past.

As flawed as the roster is, the Wolves are good enough to make the playoffs in the Western Conference. If the front office can acquire a shooting guard and Rick Adelman can coax his team into committing fewer turnovers, no one will remember a bad weekend in February.

Wild

Rarely has a team fallen so far so fast. The Wild has tumbled from No. 1 in the NHL to 12th in the Western Conference.

A loss on Thursday to Vancouver was understandable. The loss on Saturday to woeful Columbus, the Wild's second loss to Columbus in a week, gives the Wild three losses in a row and reason to fear this could become the most disappointing team in franchise history.

General Manager Chuck Fletcher faces two important tasks: Trading away veteran players to help rebuild his reservoir of young talent, and coaxing rookie coach Mike Yeo through his first NHL crisis.

Gophers hockey

An empty weekend in Denver wouldn't be so alarming if the losses weren't so remindful of coach Don Lucia's recent track record.

The Gophers should rule college hockey, and yet they haven't won a regular-season or tournament title in the WCHA since 2007, and haven't qualified for the Frozen Four since 2005. His past four conference finishes have been seventh, fifth, seventh and fifth.

Lucia's recent teams have demonstrated how much talent they have early in the season and disappointed late in the season.

Gophers basketball

The new athletic director should reassess Tubby Smith's tenure as well.

Following an overtime loss to Wisconsin at Williams Arena on Thursday, Smith's team is 5-7 in the Big Ten. With Ohio State coming to The Barn on Tuesday, Smith might be on his way to another season at .500 or below in conference play.

Smith's record in the Big Ten at Minnesota is 32-47, a winning percentage of 40.5. Dan Monson's winning percentage in conference play, including two losing seasons while he was extricating the program from Clem Haskins' reign of cheating, was 39.3. Haskins' winning percentage in the conference was 49.8.

Losing to Wisconsin at home is not problematic in isolation; it is problematic because such losses have become the norm for Smith at Minnesota.

Smith is 11-19 in the Big Ten in the past two seasons.

The Wolves should improve as Rubio matures and the team gains practice time and game experience under Adelman. The Wild is in free-fall. The Gophers hockey team is stumbling, familiarly, toward March.

The most disappointing of the teams is the Gophers basketball squad. Smith's program should be better than this by now.

Jim Souhan can be heard Sundays from 10 a.m. to noon and weekdays at 2 p.m. on 1500-AM. His Twitter name is Souhanstrib. jsouhan@startribune.com