Ray Allen's Toddler Son Has Diabetes, Not His Teenage Daughter

When Ray Allen skipped talking to the media and immediately bolted the Staples Center following Game 5, the Celtics explained it was because he had to deal with "a health issue with one of his children," declining to get into specifics out of respect for Allen's family.

Somehow, word eventually "leaked" via sports talk radio that Allen left because his daughter Tierra, a high school freshman, was hospitalized due to diabetes. The blog The Lakers Nation heard the report and posted the news, which in turn helped spread the word around the internet.

As it happens, the report was false -- as Allen clarified yesterday, it was his 17-month old son Walker who was hospitalized due to diabetes, though as you can see in the photo, he's since been released and was able to attend last night's game.

Doc Rivers was upset at the initial false report, though his anger seems to be misguided:

"The problem is, to me - and this is where I get into the blogger thing - people write anything on the Internet and it's read and then it becomes fact when it's not, unfortunately," said Rivers. "Nobody checks. There are no checks and balances and it hurts us all. That's the problem."

Rivers has railed against blogs in the past, but really, shouldn't his anger be directed at talk radio? There's a difference between aggregating information and simply making things up, and while the guys behind The Lakers Nation were mistaken (and have since apologized), so were hundreds of thousands of other listeners who heard the same report. And in hindsight, it's obvious the report wasn't all that off-base -- somewhere along the line, someone simply identified the wrong child. News travels fast in the internet age, and blogs aren't to blame.