The ‘Brooklyn Nets’ Name Is Made Official By Jay-Z

 

 By HOWARD BECK

Kathy Willens/Associated PressJay-Z announced Monday that the Nets will take the name of their new home, Brooklyn, when they leave New Jersey in 2012.

The vagabond Nets – denizens of Newark, late of East Rutherford, N.J., and Long Island – will settle in downtown Brooklyn next year with a new identity but a familiar name.
“We named the New Jersey Nets the Brooklyn Nets,” Jay-Z, the music mogul and part-owner of the franchise, announced Monday morning in a ceremony that was brief and anticlimactic.
The Brooklyn Nets moniker had been a poorly kept secret in recent months and was considered a given for some time before that, despite the public ruminations by the majority owner, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, about a rebranding. Team officials considered alternatives and drafted focus groups but ultimately chose continuity (Nets) and cachet (Brooklyn).
The modest change did not become official until Monday’s event, held under a tent on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, just across from the rising mass of steel and glass that will become the Barclays Center, where the team will begin play next fall.

Jay-Z toured the site for the first time Monday morning, then announced that he would christen the arena himself next September with a series of concerts.

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