No. The text is different for Normal vs. TIE: XXX put more effort into this game than YYY.
No... it doesn't necessarily mean he used CT. It just means that he didn't TIE as well. He could have been playing normal or CT.
I looked up from the announcement and it says that: Because Take it Easy and Crunch Time no longer directly influence the team ratings, we will instead report on the boxscore which team tried harder, or whether they tried equally hard. If you find out that the home team tried somewhat harder than the away team, you will not know whether it means the home team was playing Crunch Time against Normal or whether the home team was playing Normal against Take it Easy, although if one of the teams is your own, it's pretty easy to figure out.