dangerous."

The self-deprecation kind of sums up the guy who runs the Flyers and the

Sixers these days. There is every indication that he knows what he doesn't know.

Friday night, he was in Ottawa, right there amid the Flyers' brain trust and then up on the podium with Paul Holmgren when they traded away R.J. Umberger and selected defenseman Luca Sbisa with the first-round draft choice they received from Columbus in return.

"It is the same with the Sixers," Luukko said, 2 days before their draft. "I work closely with Ed [Snider, the chairman of Comcast-Spectacor] and the GMs to really kind of plan our futures. But I'm not a player development guy . . . I don't look at film of players, don't get into that. I might watch something if somebody says, 'Hey, look at this.' But that's what coaches and scouts and GMs do. That's their job. They make those decisions.

You've got to leave it to them, let them do their jobs.

"I do work with Paul and Ed [Stefanski] to plan our future from a team financial standpoint. I guess I'm a sounding board more than anything."

Luukko was on a train yesterday afternoon when he returned a call. He is a busy guy, especially during Draft Week - NHL, NBA, a week unlike that of any other American sports executive. Comcast-Spectacor has an organizational chart on its Web site and it makes you dizzy, looking at a graphical representation of all of the things Luukko runs for Snider.

He grew up in the arena-management side of the business, but he is very much involved now with the teams. He talks a lot of planning and long-term strategies and such. You ask him if the Umberger decision - the trade of a good young player for a draft choice, a salary-cap kind of move as well as an offense-for-defense kind of move - is the kind of thing in which he is involved, and he agrees immediately.

"When you look at the type of salary that R.J. was going to make, it really didn't fit financially within our cap and our future planning," he said. "Prior to the cap in the NHL, it was easier. Back then, you would just sign R.J. and figure it out from there. But it just isn't like that anymore.

"We want to compete and, at the same time, we want to have some flexibility. You want to maintain that flexibility. It's

important."

A couple of months ago, Snider was talking on "Daily News Live" about team-building, and how in the post-Iverson era, the Sixers wanted to be more about the team and less about the individual. It is a hockey mind-set. The NBA is much more about the stars, though - on the court and in a marketing sense. Winning without superstars in the NBA is a tough bit of business.

It might not be realistic.

"I think the philosophy is the same - you want to build a team that can compete for championships," Luukko said. "That's been Ed Snider since Day 1.

"I think you always want to build a team first. If you get too focused on star players, and star-building, that's dangerous - except maybe with a great, great player, they're few and far between. You can grow with a team. You don't want to be focused on an individual."

But you do need stars. The simple reality is that, of the 26 players selected to play in the NBA All-Star Game last season, 22 of them - that's 85 percent - were top 10 picks in the year they were drafted. Fifty-eight percent were top five picks. No other league is like the NBA that way. It is such a top-heavy business.

"Look at Detroit," Luukko said, citing the same example that Snider cited, the Pistons winning a championship under Larry Brown. "They won the ultimate prize with a team. At the same time, though, I do understand the point. Because there are only five guys on the court, because it's really an eight-man rotation, the stars are going to have a greater impact and the NBA is going to be more of a star league than the NHL."

The Sixers do not have any real star players and are not going to unearth one with the 16th pick tomorrow. If you are looking for that kind of a longshot to come in, you might just as well watch people buy Powerball tickets in a convenience store.

Luukko, though, will be with the Sixers. It is Draft Week, after all. *

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