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As the NJ Nets become Brooklyn’s team, their most well-known owner, Jay-Z is leading the re-branding effort for the team.

Apparently, the Brooklyn rapper/tastemaker/husband/father/bajillionaire has his hands in everything from the champagne and utensil makers to the design of the uniforms. To revitalize the Nets brand they’re seeking to make it slicker and more stylish. The Wall Street Journal ran a great piece on the effort that you can find here.

The part of the story that stood out the most to me was that much of the effort centers around appealing to high end ticket buyers and fans.

In addition, the Nets are set to begin marketing 11 luxury suites that will be known as “The Vault at Barclays Center,” a small, high-end space on the event level of the arena. Yes, Jay-Z chose the forks—in addition to offering his input on the Champagne ($300 bottles of Armand de Brignac), the layout (asymmetrical) and much of the décor (lots of black and shimmering metallics).

The suites themselves, which are still under construction, will be unabashedly bold—and that includes the price tag: $550,000 per year, with a minimum three-year term. That works out to $45,833 per month, instantly making them some of the most expensive rental properties in the city. That’s just slightly less than the $50,000-per-month asking rent on the townhouse

in TriBeCa where Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the beleaguered former director of the International Monetary Fund, recently resided.

I’ve wailed and moaned and complained about the fact that just like everything else in America

, viewing live sporting events from seats where the event is visible is quickly becoming a luxury for only the highest earners. Obviously, part of that is the enhanced home viewing experience and the fact that dealing with traffic when you don’t have a driver and a bar in the back of your limo is such a freaking drag! But there’s also the unrelenting focus on building everything with luxury in mind thereby raising the cost of tickets and in many cases taxes-which are also paid by those folks who don’t make enough money to enter the stadium unless they’re going to work concessions.

But Jay-Z and the Nets see the upper crust demographic as a market that should be pursued aggressively:

Yormark said Jay-Z actually approached him with a rough concept several years ago, shortly after he acquired a piece of the team. Jay-Z used the word “premium,” Yormark said, and told him that he wanted the new arena to feature a small area where the “who’s who of New York” would congregate. Not just luxury suites, Jay-Z told him, which were essential to any new stadium construction. No, he wanted something more than that.

Indeed, while Barclays Center will feature 100 suites in different parts of the arena (average annual lease: $267,000), The Vault was conceived as a collection of uber-suites, part club scene and part Kasbah, replete with a VIP entrance framed by a 15-foot sheer curtain. The first tenant? Jay-Z himself.

I’m interested to see how this rebranding works. Over the past few years the Nets have had a lot of difficulty drawing in fans and moving the team to Brooklyn which narrows the organic interest base has the potential to re-energize the franchise or destroy it altogether.

One thing we know for sure-there must be a whole lot of people in New York with a whole lot of money if they can spend that much on luxury suites for a team that hasn’t won 50 games since 2001-2002. The rest of us can only imagine.