The already daunting process of selecting a Canadian Olympic hockey team devoid of NHLers got a little more complicated last week. Hockey Canada has been planning to recruit from Europe, but the continent’s biggest loop hinted it may boycott the Games because of the IOC’s ongoing probe into Russian doping.

KHL president Dmitry Chernyshenko said in a statement Saturday that the IOC “is destroying the existing world order in sports” by threatening to bar Russian Olympians from competing in Pyeongchang in February. He went on to note how the NHL has refused to send its players to South Korea, then added “the KHL is ready to respond accordingly.”

It’s possible Chernyshenko is grandstanding; after all, if the KHL spurns the Olympics, it would be squandering the rare chance to showcase its product to the world without NHL stars hogging the limelight. But if he indeed intends to follow through, it would be a blow for Team Canada management, which is sending a team laden with KHLers — 17 in all — to the Karjala Cup tournament this week.

The Karjala Cup is the third of five international warm-up competitions scheduled in the run-up to the Games — competitions that have taken on unprecedented primacy for Team Canada this year. To accommodate a one-month break for Pyeongchang, the KHL is more than two months into its current season, a period in which several Canadians who once operated on the fringes of the NHL have established themselves as leading candidates for the Olympic roster.

As general manager Sean Burke waits to learn exactly how serious Chernyshenko was, here are six KHLers — three forwards, two defencemen and a goalie — who, on the basis of their play so far this season, appear ready to lead Canada at the Karjala Cup and beyond.

Linden Vey, C
Age: 26 years old
Hometown: Wakaw, Sask.
KHL team: Barys Astana (Kazakhstan)

The prodigious scoring touch Vey displayed in junior and the minors never quite translated to the NHL. (Just ask Vancouver Canucks fans.) But after moving on from Calgary’s AHL affiliate this summer, he now finds himself atop the KHL in scoring, with 42 points in 31 games. He has doled out a league-high 31 assists on a Barys team led by him and two other Canadian forwards, Nigel Dawes* (40 points, including 28 goals) and Matt Frattin (26 points, including 11 goals).

Vey scored 14 goals and 44 points in 138 career NHL games before bolting across the ocean. All but 22 of those games came with the Canucks, who gave him regular run on the power play and once hoped he could emerge as a viable second-line centre. He suited up for Canada, along with a host of other Olympic candidates, at the Sochi Hockey Open tournament in August.

*Dawes would have made this list, but as a naturalized Kazakh citizen who competed for that country at the 2016 world championships, he can’t play for Canada.

Wojtek Wolski, LW
Age: 31
Hometown: Toronto
KHL team: Kunlun Red Star (China)

Wolski has been a revelation with Kunlun this season: his 25 points in 25 games are tops on the Mike Keenan-led club that brought the KHL to China in 2016-17. More impressively, he has made remarkable strides since last October, when he broke his neck and was concussed after being checked and sliding headfirst into the boards during a game in Magnitogorsk, Russia.

Wolski, who was born in Zabrze, Poland and moved to Toronto as a child, scored 267 points in 451 NHL games before jumping to the KHL in 2013-14. He is a Gagarin Cup champion, having contributed 10 points in 23 playoff games to Metallurg’s push for the KHL title in 2015-16. After missing the Sochi Open and the Tournament of Nikolai Puchkov in August, the Karjala Cup will be his first pre-Olympic appearance for Canada.

Gilbert Brule, C
Age: 30
Hometown: Edmonton
KHL team: Kunlun Red Star

Brule is a former junior star and No. 6 overall draft pick who was out of hockey by age 27. In fact, he retired from the NHL on his 27th birthday, Jan. 1, 2014. Later that spring, though, Brule reversed his decision and signed in the KHL, where he has since reinvented himself as a legitimate first-line centre, the upside he never attained in North America.

Building off the strong 2016-17 season he spent in Nizhnekamsk, Russia, Brule has shone offensively with Kunlun. He has 21 points in 22 games on a team stocked with NHL forwards of yore, including Wolski, longtime Maple Leaf Alexei Ponikarovsky and former Canadiens Andrei Kostitsyn and Kyle Chipchura.

In August, Brule scored a goal in a brawly 3-2 loss to Russia at the Sochi Open. Because he never appeared at the world junior championships — he was hurt in 2006 and stuck around in the NHL in 2007 — the last time he had played for Canada was at the 2004 under-18 Ivan Hlinka tournament.

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Karl Stollery, D
Age: 29
Hometown: Camrose, Alta.
KHL team: Dinamo Riga (Latvia)

Unlike the forwards listed here, who fell short of expectations in the NHL, Canada’s defence could be filled out with veteran pros who were never expected to amount to much on this continent. One such player is Stollery, the undrafted Junior A product from Alberta who played four college seasons at Merrimack and earned 23 NHL games as a call-up over five seasons in the minors.

Stollery decamped this summer for Latvia, where he leads the KHL’s worst team in ice time (22:13 a game, 14th in the league among defencemen) and hits (46, ninth among defencemen). Strikingly, his eight points are tied for third on the team.

Of the 14 defencemen who played at the Sochi or Puchkov tournaments this summer, Stollery is one of only five heading to Karjala, indicating that Riga’s struggles haven’t marred his prospects for Pyeongchang.

Geoff Kinrade, D
Age: 32
Hometown: Nelson, B.C.
KHL team: Kunlun Red Star

Kinrade’s most noteworthy North American hockey accomplishment may be the Calder Cup he won in 2010-11 with the AHL Binghamton Senators. He has one NHL game to his name, which he played with the woeful 2008-09 Tampa Bay Lightning, and has spent time in three European leagues — the Czech Extraliga, the Swiss National League and the KHL — since 2011-12.

This season, his first in China, Kinrade has established himself as a fixture on Kunlun’s top defensive pair: his 22:44 of ice time per game leads the team and is seventh in the league among defencemen, suggesting he has won the trust of the famously irritable Keenan.

Kinrade has competed at three Spengler Cups, once with his old KHL club, Medvescak Zagreb, and twice for Canada, with whom he won the title in 2012. He was part of the Canadian blue-line corps at Sochi this August.

Ben Scrivens, G
Age: 31
Hometown: Spruce Grove, Alta.
KHL team: Salavat Yulaev Ufa (Russia)

For a fleeting period in 2013-14, Scrivens was a quality NHL goaltender: his Goals Saved Above Average figure of 9.83 was 13th in the league that season. Then he started 57 games for the truly terrible 2014-15 Oilers, who lost 20 of 21 games at one point in November and December and eventually stayed low enough in the standings to win the Connor McDavid lottery.

Scrivens never got the chance to tend goal behind McDavid; he played 15 games for Montreal in 2015-16 before finding himself in the KHL. There, he has posted a .922 save percentage and won 15 of his 24 games this season for Salavat Yulaev, which has little in the way of star power.

Incidentally, Scrivens travelled the same path to the pros as Stollery: he went from Junior A in Alberta to college for four seasons at Cornell, before playing well enough over two AHL seasons to earn a higher shot. He stopped 41 of the 43 shots he faced in two games at the Puchkov tournament in August.

BONUS ROUND: OTHER NAMES OF NOTE

These three KHLers have had offbeat seasons in one way or another, but are talented enough to break out for Canada in Pyeongchang.

Matt Frattin, RW
Age: 29
Hometown: Edmonton
KHL team: Barys Astana

The former Maple Leaf who was part of trades for everyone from Jonathan Bernier and Marian Gaborik to Jerry D’Amigo and Dion Phaneuf has thrust himself onto Canada’s Olympic radar with 26 points in 25 KHL games. Frattin didn’t play at the Sochi or Puchkov events because he only signed with Barys in late August. He became a late scratch from the Karjala roster on Monday.

Simon Despres, D
Age: 26
Hometown: Laval, Que.
KHL team: Slovan Bratislava (Slovakia)

The former Penguins first-round pick missed all but one game with the Ducks last season because of lingering concussion symptoms. After leaving for Slovakia this summer, he has five points in 21 games and is fifth in ice time among defencemen on a weak Slovan team.

Chris Lee, D
Age: 37
Hometown: MacTier, Ont.
KHL team: Metallurg Magnitogorsk (Russia)

Lee was the only non-NHLer to play for Canada at the world championships in May, after which the career minor leaguer and European pro tried to test the waters in NHL free agency. Instead, he re-signed on Oct. 26 with Metallurg, the team with which he scored 65 points — a KHL record for defencemen — last season.

• Email: nfaris@postmedia.com | Twitter: @nickmfaris