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John Tavares (Paul J. Bereswill)
The New York Islanders may change their look when they move to Brooklyn, The Post has learned.
The sports marketing brain trust at Barclays Center is weighing a change in the team’s royal blue, orange and white team colors, sources said.
Barclays Center, which will take over the business operations of the team when it moves from Nassau County as soon as 2014, is currently holding separate focus groups of Islanders fans and Brooklynites, sources added.
A member of one group told the Riverhead News-Review earlier this month he was asked to rate a new team jersey without any orange, one that looked like the old Brooklyn Dodgers uniform — blue and white.
The focus groups will be done in about 45 days — and then team owner Charles Wang will be updated, a source said.
Wang said recently that while he was turning over the business operations to Barclays Center, nothing much will change.
“We’re not going to rename the team,” he said at a recent conference. “The colors are the same. The logo is the same.”
However, Barclays Center CEO Brett Yormark is leaning toward a recommendation that the team, which has the worst attendance in the National Hockey League, undergo a complete rebranding, the source said.
Yormark is encouraged by his efforts at rebranding of the Nets upon landing in Brooklyn from Newark.
Team colors were changed to black and white. Attendance rose from a league-worst 13,961 to 17,187 per game, and jerseys, which hadn’t cracked the top 10 in popularity, finished No. 4 this past season.
Yormark, at the conference with Wang, without mentioning his study, said, “The colors black and white are the new badge of honor in Brooklyn. The question is, can we weave that into the [Islanders] color scheme, and create a connection to the fans here in Brooklyn?”
Still, Yormark wants to be careful, the source said.
He is more concerned about keeping the Islanders’ existing Long Island fan base than he was in keeping the Nets’ New Jersey faithful, the source said.
Both the Islanders and Yormark declined comment.