NEW YORK — Howard Garfinkel, who changed the landscape of college and professional basketball through an innovative high school scouting service and a celebrated instructional camp that helped groom top young players like Michael Jordan and LeBron James, as well as a roster of now-renowned coaches, died Saturday in his native Manhattan. He was 86.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, said a spokesman at Mount Sinai West Hospital, where Mr. Garfinkel died.

“He helped shape the game of basketball as we know it today,’’ Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, a frequent speaker at Mr. Garfinkel’s annual Five-Star Basketball Camp in Pennsylvania, told The New York Times in a 2013 interview.

Mr. Garfinkel, the son of a Manhattan garment worker, was a modest high school basketball player more than 70 years ago at the now-defunct Barnard High School in the Bronx.

“I could shoot a two-handed set shot, but I really had no moves because I didn’t work at it enough,’’ he told the Times in 2013. “I was more of a schoolyard-type player.’’

In time, he made his basketball name as a high school scout — a conduit of information to college coaches in the early years of their battle for schoolboy talent. His typewritten reports on players he covered from West Virginia to Maine in the 1960s and ’70s, long before the arrival of ESPN, e-mail, and YouTube, gave coaches everywhere, especially those on the West Coast, an opportunity to widen their geographic recruiting boundaries.

Among the many subscribers who paid $50 a year for his scouting services was John Wooden, the great coach of UCLA. Wooden was inspired by Mr. Garfinkel’s notes of praise about a tall, skinny center from Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan named Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Alcindor led Wooden’s teams to three straight NCAA championships, from 1967 to ’69, and as Abdul-Jabbar, he had a Hall of Fame career in the National Basketball Association.

Mr. Garfinkel, along with coaches Will Klein and Roy Rubin, created the Five-Star Basketball Camp in 1966, originally in the Columbia County hamlet of Niverville, N.Y. They moved it to Honesdale, Pa., northeast of Scranton, the next year. It became the template for what is now a staple of the basketball development and recruiting universe: the summer camp, complete with guest coaches and showcase games.

Through the years, the camp drew some of the top schoolboy talents in America. Besides Jordan and James, the rosters included future NBA stars Moses Malone, Dominique Wilkins, Alonzo Mourning, and, more recently, Chris Paul. (Malone and James each made the difficult leap from high school to the pros.)

The first camp instructor Mr. Garfinkel hired, at $50 per day, was Bob Knight, who went on to become one of college basketball’s most successful coaches, winning three NCAA championships at Indiana University.

He was followed by a parade of instructors, virtually unknown at the time, who went on to have sterling careers coaching in the college and professional ranks, among them Chuck Daly, Dick Vitale, Rick Pitino, and John Calipari.

“For a college or pro coach to get the opportunity to speak at one of his camps was like getting an opportunity to perform at Carnegie Hall,’’ Krzyzewski told the Times in 2013. “If you got that opportunity, you knew you had arrived.’’

Mr. Garfinkel, who often said he was not “an Internet guy,’’ produced his typewritten evaluations using a telephone and an IBM typewriter in his Manhattan apartment, where letters, programs, rosters, news clippings, and magazines were strewn across the floor.

Buried beneath it all were three thick binders that contained hundreds of succinct scouting reports on some of the most phenomenal schoolboy athletes ever, each of them graded by Mr. Garfinkel on a scale of 1 to 10, with comments.

“Hot prospect and can do it all,’’ Mr. Garfinkel wrote of Julius Erving, who, later known as Dr. J, became one of the game’s greatest players. “Goes well to hoop with either hand, handles ball intelligently, above-average 17-foot jump shooter, rebounds with desire and has an excellent attitude.’’