Gotta run!.

INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — For Anderson Varejao, it’s good to be back — in Cleveland, at the team’s practice facility, with a basketball in hand.

“I am so excited to be back and be playing again,” Varejao said Friday after working out with Cavaliers teammates Ramon Sessions, Luke Harangody, Samardo Samuels and Manny Harris.

Varejao, the Cavs’ popular power forward, declared himself 100 percent recovered from surgery on Feb. 12 to repair a torn tendon in his right foot. He suffered the injury during a running drill at practice Jan. 6, so he didn’t play basketball for 11 months.

Never before had he gone 11 months without playing.

“That was the first time,” he said.

After missing the final 47 games of last season, Varejao spent most of his time rehabilitating at home in Brazil over the summer. He was able to run and shoot, but he didn’t have any contact until returning to Cleveland about a month ago.

So nobody was happier to see the inside of the Cavs’ practice facility on Thursday than Varejao.

“It was good to be back there,” he said. “I feel like I’m at home when I’m there.

“I’m very excited. I’m really excited to see my friends and the fans. Everybody’s excited. I can’t wait for the season to start.”

Although NBA players were able to return to their team’s facilities this week, it will be another week until training camp officially starts — pending final agreement between players and management on the new collective bargaining agreement.

Varejao thinks most of his teammates will be back by Monday. He’s looking forward to that — and to getting to know rookies Kyrie Irving and Tristan Thompson. He met them before the lockout, but he hasn’t been in touch since.

He closely followed the news of the lockout and always had faith there would be a season, which was why he tried to stay in shape in spite of the uncertainty. Now he’s eager to see what kind of condition he’s in.

He said his foot gets a little sore after a tough workout, but he wants to test it in practice.

“I need to go through a practice to see how I feel,” he said. “I won’t really know until I start running and doing drills.”

He envisions a much healthier and improved team from the one that went 19-63 last season.

“Without injuries, I believe we can do much better,” he said. “We’re going to try to get to the playoffs.”

Preseason schedule: The Cavs will host the Detroit Pistons on Dec. 20 in their only preseason game at The Q.

The Cavs also will host a free intrasquad scrimmage at The Q at 1 p.m. on Dec. 18. The Cavs will open the preseason with a game at Detroit on Dec. 16 at 7:30 p.m.

The preseason schedule, normally eight games, was shortened after the lockout caused the start of training camp to be pushed back to Dec. 9, and the start of the season to be pushed back to Dec. 25.

Ticket information for the preseason game and scrimmage will be announced next week. The full regular-season schedule will be announced Tuesday. It appears (unofficially) that the Cavs will open Dec. 26 against Toronto.

Christmas schedule: In what many Cavs fans will see as a gift, the Dallas Mavericks will hoist their 2011 NBA championship banner before their nationally televised game against the Miami Heat on Christmas Day. That game will be televised at 2:30 p.m. on WEWS Channel 5, followed by the Chicago Bulls at the Los Angeles Lakers. TNT will open the day with a game between Boston and New York at noon. ESPN will show Orlando at Oklahoma City at 8 p.m., followed by the Los Angeles Clippers at Golden State.

Charge signings: The Canton Charge, the Cavs’ new D-League team, signed former Louisiana Tech guard Kyle Gibson and former Massachusetts forward Dante Milligan.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: mschmitt@plaind.com, 216-999-4668

On Twitter: @pdcavsinsider

What are your opinions.

The news surrounding the NBA has been more positive over the last few days, and that could mean the beginning of the 2011-12 season will happen before long. Social media still has speculation of several trades and the latest from Bleacher Report has the Cleveland Cavaliers acquiring a much-needed big man to fill the middle of the lane.

Al Jefferson averaged nearly 19 points and 10 rebounds per game for the Utah Jazz last year, but the team drafted another center this summer and that could spell the end for Jefferson in Utah. Cleveland has some terrific young players on its roster, but lacks a true center and adding Jefferson would give the team some leadership and a center that can help on both ends of the court.

The Cavaliers are still in rebuilding mode after the departure of LeBron James, but making a deal like this would make Cleveland a playoff contender in the Eastern Conference. Both teams need to make some roster moves to improve upon last season’s failures and if Utah can add some help to their back-court from a deal, this trade will make sense for both teams, and that is good news for Jazz and Cavalier fans.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cavaliers guard Baron Davis returned to Cleveland on Wednesday for a day of community service. He visited a couple of schools, made a stop at the Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center to salute service men and women ahead of Veterans Day on Friday and talked about sports and music at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“I didn’t want the fans to think that any of us forgot about them,” Davis said. “That’s why I’m here.”

When he invited questions from a rapt audience of about 40 invited guests at the Rock Hall last night, he got at least a dozen questions — but not one about the lockout that has kept him and his teammates off the court at The Q a few blocks away.

The closest query was about how basketball had changed for him from when he started playing at the age of 4.

“A lot of the innocence is lost,” he said. “It’s a business first, and the stakes are a whole lot higher.”

As Davis made his way around his new hometown, NBA owners and union representatives were meeting in New York to try to bring an end to the lockout, which reached Day 132 on Wednesday.

“Today, for me, is not really about the lockout,” Davis said after the event. “It’s about why am I here in Cleveland. It’s about the veterans at the VA. Veterans Day is coming up, so let’s go in there and talk to these guys and hang out and make them feel their worth for their sacrifice and everything they’ve done to keep us safe.

“Today was a day of impact, a day of inspiration. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what we’re all capable of as a union, as a league. We’re capable of affecting people’s lives. I think a lot of times that gets forgotten.”

Looking fit and energized, Davis said he was starting to get jittery waiting for basketball to start. But he has been keeping busy, he said. Although he was enrolled at UCLA over the summer, he didn’t enroll for the fall semester because he thought he would be going back to work.

He said that was also the reason there never were workouts organized for his locked-out teammates.

“Every time we’d get ready to organize, we [thought] we were on our way back,” he said.

He is trying to organize a charity game in Los Angeles later this month that would feature some Cavs players, and he said he would like to do the same here, although he did not provide specifics.

“We’ll get together, probably even do some type of charity game here in Cleveland for the fans, like a giveback game in Cleveland for the fans,” he said.

Wednesday’s schedule was a step in that direction. Asked what he got out of spending the day with Cleveland-area students and veterans, Davis said: “I don’t want to get anything. I want to give. I’m not here in Cleveland to do anything but give. I want to give to the people. I want to give to these kids and I want to inspire whomever is out there willing to listen.

“I think if I were to say what I get out of that: I get an opportunity to learn something new about myself, learn something new about Cleveland as a whole and as a community. For me, it’s all about giving at this point in my career, at this point in my life.”

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: mschmitt@plaind.com, 216-999-4668

On Twitter: @pdcavsinsider

Not much else going on in the NBA world today.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — After months of dealing with doctors and physical therapists, it sounds as though the only ones keeping Anderson Varejao off an NBA court are league owners and union officials.

An agent for the Cavaliers center said Varejao’s torn ankle tendon has healed, allowing him to participate in drills and pick-up games. He appeared in just 31 Cavaliers’ games last season before requiring ankle surgery in February.

“Anderson feels great, he’s pain free,” agent Aylton Tesch said.

Varejao, 28, has spent the past week training in Tampa with Cavaliers free agent Anthony Parker. This weekend, he plans to return to Brazil and prepare for an NBA season jeopardized by a lockout.

Tesch said overseas teams have made inquiries about Varejao, due to make $7.7 million this season with the Cavaliers. But the club’s most tenured player wants to be healthy for the upcoming NBA season, assuming there is one, the agent said.

Varejao spent the summer rehabbing the ankle at the Brazilian Olympic facility in Rio de Janeiro and his hometown of Vitoria.

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That’s all the news for today.

Since his last year at Weber State in 2004-05, 6-11 big man Lance Allred(notes) has played for 10 professional teams, including a stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers, and two D-League teams. And yet you probably know him best as the NBA’s first legally deaf player, as Allred has 75 to 80 percent hearing loss in both his ears. You might also remember him as the person on national TV that was forced into the uncomfortable task of defending a polygamist sect that his family grew up among years ago, but has long since disowned.

Now we all need to catch up and begin to regard him as a writer of some renown. Because Allred’s second book, Basketball Gods: The Transformation of the Enlightened Jock, is being released by his website today, and just a quick scan through the pages reveals a writer at home with his own voice who also (and this is where you get closer to the screen) has some pretty fantastic behind the scenes bits for NBAniks to peruse through.

This may not even be the best snippet to post (from his time spent on Orlando’s Summer League squad, back in 2009), but I’m sure we’ll find more as we make our way through what is Allred’s followup to the highly-regarded Longshot, published in 2009:

I showed up to camp, expecting a 10-man camp as originally stated, only to find that there were 16 players. Not good. I didn’t like being duped yet again by another NBA team. The fact that they said they were only bringing in 10 men, was one of the big kickers for me in getting me to commit, as it implied I would be getting more reps. But now with 16 men at camp, there would be no such guarantees.

Patrick Ewing was the coach for those two weeks and for some reason he decided that he was going to play and start a guy at center who played no more than 10 minutes a game in the D-League the season before, with stats not much better than five points a game. That same guy would not even stay on a D-League roster the next season. Go figure.

I ended up playing less than 10 minutes a game for that summer league. Chalk it up to yet another summer league experience.

Why didn’t I play? Who knows?

[...]

During that camp I spent the week going through the motions, being the good soldier, marching when ordered. Mostly, I just sat there on the end of the bench, while big names came and went through the gymnasium.

I still find it humorous as to just how little people realize how hearing impaired I am, and subsequently how well I read lips. The practice gym in Orlando, in which the games were played, is very small and thus had a limited and closed quarters of seating. I could look in any direction and see anyone’s lips. I felt like I was in high school all over again. Everyone walking around in their cliques, with rivalries and stale grudges dividing areas of the gym; not just according to teams. Think high school kids with millions of dollars to blow.

That’s just what my finger landed on this morning, after figuratively spinning the globe on Allred’s globe-spinning memoir.

The book can be had for very, very reasonable terms (I’ll let Allred break them down for you) on Lance’s website. You can also read an engaging interview with him that was published on USA Today for Tuesday, or follow him on Twitter for more updates.

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