LOS ANGELES — Watching Stanford basketball is very much like dating the girl next door. Most of the time, she’s great (one or two wins from the NCAA Tournament on a team with one starting upperclassman), but she’s not going to compare, well, to a supermodel (say, UCLA), and you can nitpick her flaws.

Sure, Fred can drive and defend, but he can’t shoot. Mitch is a step slow defensively, has been forcing passes and can’t shoot (though, don’t look now, but he’s starting to hit that three from the right side of the arc with regularity). Robin’s defense is rock-solid (and so underrated), but he’s in a monthlong slump on the other end. Brook’s normally a defensive presence, but his inexperience gets exposed by bigs like Jon Brockman or, just two days ago, Lorenzo Mata. Law’s a great shooter, but he can’t create well off the dribble and seems to lose his defensive focus at times.

And Cindy Crawford has a mole.

All these things are true, but they’ve been analyzed to death in the media and among fans these past few months. If Mitch or Fred were a 40-percent three-point shooter, or Brook an all-conference defender, this team would be in the top 25; however, I don’t think that’s the major difference between Stanford and a top-notch team.

Plain and simple, the biggest difference between Stanford and a team like UCLA is speed.

Want proof?

Look at turnovers. Sure, sloppy handling and youth plays a role, but at the end of the day, fast players are able to poke away balls better than slower ones. Exhibit A: Darren Collison. And at a minus-3 turnovers margin per game, Stanford ranks dead-last in the conference. Sure enough, on Saturday the decisive factor was points off turnovers. UCLA scored 14, Stanford just two.

“We didn’t take care of it well, and there went the basketball game,” head coach Trent Johnson said.

While turnovers come close, ultimately, there’s no definitive statistic that you can point to that measures speed. It’s more like pornography — you know it when you see it. Thursday at USC, and Saturday at Pauley, Stanford was slower across the board.

You could argue that most games are won and lost in the halfcourt offense, not on the turnover-induced fastbreak, but even there, speed’s a killer. On offense, Stanford’s guys often aren’t quick enough to get open. How many possessions have you sat through this season with Stanford trying to start the offense, except no one is able to get open, and so it’s Goods to Washington to Goods to Washington on the perimeter. If the Lopez twins didn’t attract so much attention — Brook scores through his double teams, while Robin, despite his low output of late, is still consistently doubled — this would be an even bigger problem.

It’s the real killer on defense. To be fair, on the strength of great post defense, Stanford is allowing few points overall.

But when opponents do score, it’s often by exploiting their speed. Isolate a guard and let him break down his defender. (Or Stanford’s defender, aware of the speed discrepancy, lags off and the opponent has an open jumper or floater in the lane.)

Set a pick, run a player around it — and Stanford struggles to keep up.

Indeed, Aaron Afflalo took Lawrence Hill to school on Saturday, running off screens. Many of his 20 points came with him running left to right across the baseline (the post sets the pick in the paint) and popping out in the corner for a shot, with the long arms of the Law a few steps behind.

Often off this play, Afflalo made four of seven threes on the game, many of them open. On one particularly bad sequence in the late first, he not only drained a three, but also picked up a foul on Hill, trying to contest the shot a split-second too late. In the second, Hill again arrived late, fouling him and sending him to the line for three free throws.

So what can Stanford do to respond?

They can try to switch more frequently to zone, but that can allow opponents open looks and also makes boxing out more difficult on rebounds — Stanford’s chronic problem against USC.

They can put Fred Washington on the opponent’s best scorer. Washington is the one guy who pretty consistently keeps up on defense. The only problem is Washington can’t guard everybody, and lots of Pac-10 teams are stacked with multiple outside scoring threats, such as UCLA (Afflalo, Collison and Josh Shipp), Oregon (Aaron Brooks, Malik Hairston, Tajuan Porter, Bryce Taylor) or USC (Nick Young, Gabe Pruitt, Lodrick Stewart).

Anthony Goods’ return will help. Casual fans celebrate his shooting (slightly overrated if you look at the numbers — he takes an awful lot of shots), but his speed, while by no means elite, is definitely an upgrade over his replacement Mitch Johnson’s. With Washington and Goods as a one-two defending combo, Stanford might just be able to squeak out a tight tournament game down the road.

Ultimately though, it’s a zero-sum game — whatever Stanford does to compensate for its speed deficit creates another opening for an opponent to attack. Speed then, is Stanford’s Achilles heel, and come NCAA Tournament time, some faster team will knock Stanford out in the first few rounds.

Then again, every team has its Achilles heel. Stanford just needs to exploit its opponents’ — and not get burnt too badly off the screens.