Spectacor, the company that Snider and his family control, would operate the hockey and basketball franchises as well as the new arena and the Spectrum.
It is also possible that fitness entrepreneur Pat Croce would be an investor in the 76ers and have an operating role with the team.
The deal would mark the end of Harold Katz's long and controversial reign as owner of the 76ers.
Katz bought the 76ers for $12 million in 1981 and is expected to receive about $120 million for them. His club won an NBA championship in 1983, but after a decade of decline, it is now among the league's very worst performers on the court and at the box office.
In all, publicly traded Comcast likely would spend about a half-billion dollars to gain control of two teams and a brand-new arena.
Snider said yesterday that he had participated in discussions with Comcast, the fourth-largest cable company in the nation. He denied that he had sold the team but added that if he were in discussions on such a deal, he wouldn't talk about it.
``We've talked to Comcast about a lot of different things, but not about selling the team to them,'' Snider said. ``There is no way under any sort of circumstances, if we were having any discussions with anybody, that I could ever comment on it. It's just not the kind of thing that I would comment to anybody about.
``I'm very happy right now. I'm thrilled with the way the building is going up. I'm thrilled with the way the team is going. The bottom line is that it's just impossible for me to comment. We have ongoing discussions with people about all kinds of things all the time.
``But I can assure you I am not selling out. I'm not selling the team, and I'm not selling out.''
Katz could not be reached for comment. For the last several months, he has rarely attended Sixers games. He did appear at the Spectrum last weekend after an absence of several weeks.
A spokesman at Comcast said the company would have no comment.
Comcast had a board meeting on Wednesday at which the deal was said to have been approved.
The acquisitions would give Comcast a foothold in the sports industry at a moment when other media companies are investing heavily in sports.
The media conglomerate Viacom, which until the summer of 1994 owned the NBA's New York Knicks, the NHL's New York Rangers and Madison Square Garden, sold them to another media company, a partnership of Cablevision and ITT. CNN founder Ted Turner, now a part of the Time Warner empire, owns baseball's Atlanta Braves and the NBA's Atlanta Hawks.
Wayne Huizenga, chairman of Blockbuster Video, controls the NFL's Miami Dolphins, baseball's Florida Marlins and the NHL's Florida Panthers in South Florida. Disney owns the NHL's Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. And the Chicago Tribune Co. owns baseball's Chicago Cubs.
Comcast Corp., with headquarters at 1500 Market St., serves 3.4 million U.S. households.
Buying sports teams could be part of Comcast's long-range goal of beefing up its capacity to produce original programming - a strategy common among big cable operators, including industry leaders Tele-Communications Inc. and Time Warner Inc.
Comcast, whose main programming vehicle is QVC Inc., the shopping channel, lags behind both TCI and Time Warner in the variety and depth of its programming assets.
Comcast put up $1.3 billion in cash in 1994 to buy a controlling interest in QVC - and kill a rival CBS bid in the process.
Until then, Comcast had been only a minority shareholder in a handful of programming ventures. It owned 20 percent of the Golf Channel, plus smaller pieces of Viewer's Choice, E! Entertainment Television, and Florida's Sunshine Network, and a little bit of Turner Broadcasting.
Snider has owned the Flyers since the team's 1967-'68 inaugural season, and the team has been a passion for him.
The CoreStates Center is the culmination of nearly a half-decade of Snider's struggling for financing - and then of his struggling with Katz over what lease terms would be acceptable to the Sixers in the new arena.
Katz finally won favorable lease terms: a deal on luxury boxes, parking and concessions that put the 76ers on a par with Snider's Flyers in the new building.
Snider needed Katz and the Sixers' 41 regular-season home games to make the new arena work financially. But as the 76ers' fortunes continued to decline this season, it became increasingly apparent that the team - with its paltry attendance - was not likely to contribute to the success of the new arena and could instead become a drain on it.
