Notre Dame Basketball: D.J. Harvey cleared to play

D.J. Harvey has been medically cleared to play for Notre Dame basketball.

Did you blink? Did you look away from your twitter feed at all on Monday? If you answered “yes” you may have missed it. D.J. Harvey has been cleared to return to the Notre Dame basketball team.

At 11:19 am on Monday morning Notre Dame sophomore wing D.J Harvey tweeted out a short, but very important two word post:

“I’m back.”

Harvey, a 6-6 guard/forward and former five star recruit is currently recovering from offseason microfracture surgery. His ailing knee robbed him of the second half of his freshman campaign.

As a freshman, Harvey averaged roughly six points and three rebounds per game. He appeared in 19 games and started in five. He received an opportunity to be a more of an impact player for the Irish when senior forward Bonzie Colson went down, scoring 17 points in the game following Colson’s injury. Unfortunately, he suffered his own injury shortly thereafter.

It should be noted that D.J. may not be completely out of the woods yet. This is more than likely a two part process. Being medically cleared to resume basketball activities is the first part. Gaining strength and — just as importantly — confidence in the knee, is the second. If he is not feeling like the knee is a 100 percent, a medical redshirt could come in to play.

Overall, this is exciting news. Harvey has tremendous upside and pedigree. Mike Brey’s squad is also incredibly young this year, so any experience at the college level would be welcome. Another scorer would also alleviate some of the pressure on freshman forward Nate Laszewski to provide a secondary offensive punch behind Temple Gibbs.

I will try to temper my expectations until D.J. has had the opportunity to go full speed in practice for a bit and hopefully avoids any setbacks. As I stated in a previous piece about Harvey, microfracture surgery is far from perfected and is known to be quite unpredictable. If the Irish are able to get through this season without another knee injury,that would be a small miracle. Juwan Durham, Prentiss Hubb and Harvey are all key components of the 2018-19 that have a history of knee ailments.