Welcome to Part 2 of ND Basketball’s Missed Leap. (By the way, if Notre Dame wants to keep winning games in the final seconds, we’re totally willing to extend this series as long as necessary to keep that going.)

Last week in our series on what happened to keep Notre Dame basketball from making The Leap after back-to-back Elite Eights, we went over how coach Mike Brey’s uncharacteristic moves to pursue top-tier talent backfired on the Irish. This week, we discuss the main reason we saw it backfire so quickly.

Terrible, and I mean terrible, injury luck

I have absolutely no empirical basis to make the following statement but I’m going to make it anyway: I seriously doubt any team was as hurt as much by injury across the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons as were the Irish. The ’18 season, of course, was particularly absurd in this respect, as the team’s MVP Bonzie Colson went down with a broken foot one game into ACC action, followed one game later by a bone bruise for their second-best player, Matt Farrell. Farrell was in and out of the lineup the rest of the year, probably never at 100 percent, and Colson didn’t return until nearly March. On top of that, D.J. Harvey, who we discussed last week, suffered a knee injury that required microfracture surgery, and he was never the same athletically. Somehow, ND managed to persevere and remain competitive, and still arguably should’ve made the tournament (more on this in our third installment).

Now, that ’18 team likely wasn’t great anyway – recall that, even fully healthy, they lost games to a bad Ball State team and a barely-.500 IU squad. But it’s pretty easy to imagine that, given that the remaining Irish lost four league games by five points or fewer (three of those coming in a damaging seven-game losing streak), a full-strength Farrell and Colson would’ve made for a far better year.

You’d think dropping your two best players in a 5-on-5 sport would’ve been enough bad luck for a while, but it continued the following year when Rex Pflueger, who was playing some of the best hoops of his ND career at the time, blew out his knee in a win over Purdue; post defender Juwan Durham went down injured for a good chunk of the season; and freshman Robby Carmody was knocked out for the year. That ND team, young as they were, wasn’t going to be very good to begin with, and those injuries knocked them down to DFL in the ACC. This was an absolutely disastrous turn of events coming just two years after an ACC finals appearance and a 5 seed in the Dance.

Carmody also blew out his knee this season, although admittedly that doesn’t hold a candle to the issues faced the previous two years. Still, it stinks to see his career seemingly get extinguished before it got started. The only silver lining is that it’s blunted the opinion some in the 18S writers’ room hold – that Pflueger’s injury last year also hurt the development of the team long-term because minutes that ought to be going to young players this year are instead going to him. With Carmody knocked out, Pflueger isn’t really blocking anyone anymore – although the fact that ND doesn’t have much to develop right now is another issue.

Next time, we’ll conclude this series with some good old-fashioned whining about getting hosed by other people. That’s always fun and healthy!