Maryland men’s basketball forward Ivan Bender’s friendship with center Michal Cekovsky is even stronger than we thought.
Wednesday night’s game against Minnesota was the Terps’ first without Cekovsky after his season-ending fractured ankle injury last weekend. Bender was sad to take the court without his “brother.”
So before tipoff, Bender posted a picture of his game socks on Snapchat with “15” —Cekovsky’s jersey number — on the tip of each foot and wrote “In honor to my brother #Blessed for an opportunity.”
Cekovsky later screenshotted it and added a few heart emojis. He captioned it “The award for best friend” before uploading it to his own story.
The European duo’s feel-good moment didn’t end with the social media wardrobe shoutout.
After Bender laced his shoes over those special socks, he was an unstoppable force in the first half. He notched a career-high 12 points, scoring eight of the Terps’ last 10 in the period.
He added three more after the break to reach 15 and could’ve had more if he didn’t miss three shots throughout the game. But that wouldn’t have kept with the night’s No. 15 theme.
Maryland’s 89-75 loss on the Xfinity Center court stung, but Bender lessened the pain as he spoke after the game about his power and confidence to convert layups and dunk.
“I did it for Ceko tonight,” he said.
“In the past, as you said, I’ve been having chances to dunk, but I made some, I missed some,” Bender continued. “But today I was, like, encouraged, especially because Ceko was out and meant a lot to me, so I tried to finish everything.”
