Keven McDonald

Keven R. McDonald was born on 2 June 1956 in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Bloomfield. He attended Seton Hall Preparatory School in West Orange, where he was a standout known for a mature inside game and a soft jumper, and was sometimes called Mr. Everything.

He scored 1,774 career points at Seton Hall Prep, a school record until Ashton Gibbs broke it in 2008. In an annual summer all-star game pitting New York and New Jersey players against the rest of the country, he outscored Moses Malone. By his graduation in 1974 he had interest from hundreds of colleges and scholarship offers from UCLA and USC. Seton Hall Prep inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1987.

Wanting to stay near home and planning on law school, McDonald considered the Naval Academy and Princeton before choosing the University of Pennsylvania. Freshman eligibility rules kept him off the varsity in 1974 and 1975, the year Penn won the Ivy League.

As a sophomore he took on a leading role after Ron Haigler and Bob Bigelow graduated, leading Penn at 18.9 points per game and making the first of three straight first-team All-Ivy and All-Big 5 teams. In 1976 and 1977, Chuck Daly's last season as coach, he led the Quakers in scoring (21.2) and rebounding (9.2) and won the Robert V. Geasey Trophy as the best player in Big 5 competition.

In his senior season of 1977 and 1978 he averaged 22.3 points as Penn went 20 and 8 and returned to the NCAA Tournament. Against St. Bonaventure in the first round he scored 37 points with 13 rebounds, both school tournament records, and in the Sweet 16 Penn lost narrowly to Duke, the eventual runner-up, with McDonald hampered by early fouls. He was named Ivy League Player of the Year. He finished with 1,644 points in three varsity seasons, fourth on Penn's all-time list, and a career scoring average second only to Ernie Beck.

The Seattle SuperSonics chose him with the 42nd pick of the 1978 NBA draft, but coach Lenny Wilkens released him on 30 September 1978. He played 34 games for Turun NMKY in Finland in 1978 and 1979, helping the club to silver in the Korisliiga, tried out with the San Diego Clippers in 1979 and the Philadelphia 76ers in 1980, and played a few games for the Lancaster Red Roses of the Continental Basketball Association.

After his last tryout McDonald took a job as a stockbroker in San Francisco and went on to work in various areas of financial services. He studied law at Rutgers Law School in Newark while holding a full-time job, earned his Juris Doctor and became a licensed attorney in New Jersey. He also owned and operated McDonald Properties, LLC, a real estate investment company.

Keven McDonald died on 10 October 2026, at the age of 70. His death was announced through Martin's Home for Service in Montclair, New Jersey, which published a death notice on 12 October. The place and cause of his death were not made public, and no service details had been announced at the time of the first reports. News of his death was reported on 13 October by outlets covering Penn and New Jersey basketball.

McDonald is remembered as one of the greatest players in Penn basketball history and a defining figure of the Quakers' era as a nationally prominent program. He was inducted into the Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Fame in 1985, named to the Ivy League's 2018 Class of Legends of Ivy League Basketball and inducted into the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame in 2019. He still holds Penn's record for points in an NCAA Tournament game.

His college coach Bob Weinhauer said at his Hall of Fame induction that McDonald always got mentioned by the basketball people at Penn and was definitely one of the top players the university had ever had.