In 1999, David Stern ended the lockout by shattering player unity. He convinced the hard-working vets that the do-nothing superstars did not have their best interests in mind. The NBA’s upper crust (well, at least the ones on the court—really, all players are proles) didn’t want to lose the right to unlimited individual salaries. The other guys, they just wanted to get back to work. Stern, master manipulator that he is, saw a fissure and broke it wide open with a few well-timed remarks and letters. The few lost the support of the many, and for very obvious structural reasons, the NBPA edifice came crashing down.

Yup, that’s how Dave Stern slew the lockout, with a hand that tore the players in two. See the breach, destroy the opponents. The lesson received from the 1999 lockout is in keeping with the most literal interpretation of the old labor axiom: Unity at all costs. That’s why the NFLPA has been able to partner with the Teamsters, and why the NBPA didn’t look patently ridiculous when it came out in support of the protesters in Madison. The NBPA had t-shirts printed, “STAND: THE 2011 NBPA SUMMER MEETING NYC” beating home the message: Stern can’t beat us as long as we stick together.

So, then, what to make of Deron Williams’s decision to play in Turkey until further notice? He’s been accused of violating that code of stick-togetherness; claiming special privileges that only the elite can; and maybe even something resembling “reverse-scabbing”. Williams has conversely been praised for giving players more ammunition, proving that they don’t in fact need the NBA, and asserting the economic independence of the players in a way that agent-engineered barnstorming tours of China never could. How could the two sides be so far apart on the meaning of one man’s actions?

What’s missing from our over-simplified, mythic version of 1999 is that Stern’s divide-and-conquer strategy worked precisely because at that time, the divisions were acrimonious. This summer’s lockout is more complicated and less glamorous. The superstars have already been screwed. At one point, the owners had planned to make the Miami Heat their boogeyman, but it was the Mavs—spending like crazy without violating anyone’s sense of common decency—who won the title. All the comments about teams losing money and teams not being able to compete have ended up as an attack on the league’s middle class, or at least those making between $7 and $12 million a year.

The superstars, however, are in an entirely different situation. They cannot be screwed any further, but unless the owners somehow sidle up to them like 1999 never happened, there’s no way they side with management. It really doesn’t matter what Deron Williams does, because he doesn’t speak for the majority of players, and it was the particular shape of 1999′s dispute that allowed this kind of division, and over-literal interpretation of labor cant, to be seen as the NBPA’s fatal flaw. This year’s lockout has a lot of moving parts, and separate, though not necessarily conflicting, interests. Unity can be buried, or obscured, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Determining the strength or weakness of the NBPA isn’t as simple as worrying about a replay of 1999. Williams, or other superstars, going overseas simply proves that they, like the owners, don’t need the NBA to survive. It’s hard to make a case, though, that the two parties share common ground. For the players, it’s disdain. The owners are engaged in bottom-line brutalism and stuck with businesses that, at some point, must be revived.

This Sports Illustrated piece on Larry Fleisher, the man who invented NBPA clout, takes him to task for also working as an agent. Well, why shouldn’t he? He fought for rights … let the man make a buck off of his good works. By that same token, players like Williams can really play wherever the hell they want as long as they stayed annoyed at the owners. They don’t have to be linking arms with their less-valued peers to achieve unity; they just can’t move in the opposite direction. The NBA lost its superstars in 1999 and now they’re wandering, accountable to no one in the lockout warz but certainly inclined toward anything that doesn’t take advantage of the rest of the league (as was done to them).

In their most basic formulation, labor struggles are—or are imagined to be—even more timeless and stripped-down than modern sporting events. Eli Saslow’s Washington Post piece on a nearly prehistoric ball game (“ba”) captures what many want out of a good, old-fashioned lockout: Two sides in pitched battle, with nothing but principle and moral clarity to guide them. The proceedings may be byzantine, but the rules are simple. This is a fantasy, albeit one that works better with most player/owner standoffs than the sports they claim to represent. Maybe, in the end, we want labor battles to take on the primordial form of a sport that our civilization left behind long ago. Unfortunately, unless you get a masterstroke and an opportunity, like Stern in 1999, labor is ultimately a lot like, and perhaps even more modern than, sports themselves.