Back in the day, it was good enough to hang out with your buddies and watch basketball on TV and amuse yourselves by challenging each other with arcane trivia and stories of legendary games from the past. Today, we still do that but if you don't have a smartphone that has a super fast 4G LTE connection you are simply missing out on the action.
Don't worry though - if you think that requires a ton of money for the phone and plan each month, things have gotten a lot cheaper recently and you can even get the awesome LG L90 smartphone from Walmart for under $100 and plans start at only $29.88 including 500 MB of 4G LTE data (unlimited Talk, Text, and non 4G LTE data).