The coaches . . . after Game 1

POSTGAME:
Kelly McCrimmon, the Wheat Kings’ GM/head coach, said he was “disappointed with the effort and the result.”
“The fans were excited to get started and their team didn’t play well,” he said.
The Wheat Kings hadn’t played in 20 days, since they lost the Eastern Conference final to the Calgary Hitmen. As a result, McCrimmon said he felt it was “key” to get to the 10-minute mark of the first period without having incurred a whole lot of damage.
“If we could do that, it would have allowed us to get our feet underneath us . . . we didn’t quite get there.”
Unfortunately for Brandon, it couldn’t get to the 5:00 mark in good shape. Windsor had a 4-0 led by that point.
During the last bit of the WHL playoffs, the Wheat Kings used G Jacob DeSerres more than Andrew Hayes. But Hayes started Game 1 here.
McCrimmon admitted that the Wheat Kings had used the two goaltenders fairly evenly down the stretch in the regular season, and that DeSerres had played more in the playoffs.
After being eliminated, the Wheat Kings took a week off and then practised for two weeks. During those practices, McCrimmon said, he felt Hayes was the better of the two goaltenders.
And, he added, starting Hayes also was “a gut feeling.”
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Windsor head coach Bob Boughner admitted that his club’s start in the 2009 Memorial Cup played an important role in the way it started Friday’s game.
The Spitfires lost their first two round-robin games a year ago, and then won four straight elimination games to win the Memorial Cup.
Last year, he said, it “didn’t go very well for us” and his club surely didn’t want to experience a repeat of that.
“I thought we played our game for the first half,” Boughner added, and you can mark that down as the leading candidate for the biggest understatement of this tournament.
By the time this game was half over, Windsor held a 7-0 lead.
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The highlight of the postgame gathering with the two coaches?
Someone asked McCrimmon how he would deal with the fact that his club had been beaten badly in the last game of the Eastern Conference final with the Hitmen — Calgary won Game 5, 6-1, on April 23 — and now had been badly beaten again.
McCrimmon’s silence and his steely glare spoke volumes.