In this paper, we consider a delay-limited hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol that makes use of incremental redundancy over the three-node decode-and-forward (DF) relay fading channel where one source cooperates with a relay to transmit information to the destination. We provide an estimate of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) at finite signal to noise ratio (SNR) based on tight bounds on outage probabilities for two channel models. The results for the long term quasi-static channel highlight the distributed diversity, ie. the cooperative space diversity, and the HARQ coding gain, achieved by soft combining the successive transmitted punctured codewords via incremental redundancy. On the other hand, the results for the short term quasi-static channel illustrate the diversity gains obtained thanks to cooperative space diversity and time diversity, along with the HARQ coding gain. Using the DMT formulation, we show that equal power partitioning between the source and the relay nodes provides close to optimal performance. Furthermore, thanks to the extension of the finite-SNR DMT to the finite-SNR diversity-multiplexing-delay tradeoff, we show that, unlike the asymptotic SNR analysis, the ARQ delay, defined as the number of retransmissions rounds, impacts the performance of the HARQ relay protocol for high effective multiplexing gain.