ATLANTA — It’s been said in sports that film doesn’t lie.

The Liberty watched the tape of their Game 1 loss and came away with a clear conclusion: Their third-quarter collapse was mostly self-inflicted. They were the main characters in their own demise.

“I would probably say that too if I didn’t want to admit that we got beat by somebody else,” Dream wing Rhyne Howard said Tuesday.

The Dream reviewed the same film and walked away believing they were the cause of the Liberty’s defeat.

The implication from the Atlanta star?

The film may not lie, but the team watching it might be in denial.

“We know how we played,” Howard said. “We know what we’re going to continue to do. If they want to think it’s self-inflicted, then that’s just on them.”

New York was well aware of Atlanta’s modus operandi of wanting to feast on opponents’ miscues. And yet, the Liberty became the Dream’s latest victim in Sunday’s 92-82 defeat.

The Liberty coughed up 21 turnovers, which the Dream converted into 32 points to tie a WNBA playoff record.

The third quarter was especially brutal.

The Dream’s pressure was suffocating. Atlanta stole the ball nine times and scored 16 points off the turnovers. The fluid ball movement that’s a defining trait of New York’s offense came to a halt. The offense became stagnant and the Liberty were unable to snap out of it.

“This is not me trying to point or anything, I just think that there’s things that we can run to kind of get the ball a little bit more, a little more flow, a little bit more energy,” Jonquel Jones said after the loss. “At times, we were kind of a little bit stagnant with what we were running.”

How the Liberty adjust to the Dream’s defensive pressure in Game 2 Wednesday will determine what happens next.

Several Liberty players said they thought the Dream would do something “a little bit different defensively” in Game 1. Catering to what Atlanta was doing “stalled” New York from getting into an offensive rhythm, Breanna Stewart said.

“We planned too much around that instead of playing our style and offensively doing what we know we can,” Stewart said.

It took time to recalibrate.

Stewart believes there’s an obvious solution to what happened.

“We have to get back to our tendencies,” she said. “We talk a lot about wheeling and feeling behind and that type of thing so seeing how their shape defensively is going to get altered based on what they’re going to do … but the wheel will create an opening for someone to drive middle and if the nail help is there, then we should have open shots.”

Sabrina Ionescu and the other guards play a major role in this.

Ionescu may have had a scoring outbreak, reaching 27 points for the first time in two months. But she had one assist (and five turnovers) in 34 minutes.

Ionescu emphasized the importance of getting paint touches when the offense gets stuck.

“When we’re being aggressive and getting downhill into the paint, it’s either looking to score or kick and that really opens up the floor for us,” she said. “So I think that just has to be key.”

Ionescu and Jones were in the camp that believed the Liberty were to blame for Sunday’s outcome.

“Looking back, it was a lot of our own doing, just sloppy with the ball, making passes that weren’t there, just getting it taken out of our hands,” Ionescu said. “That’s the positive in it all is a lot of the stuff we can control and not necessarily only what they were doing but how we can be better through it.”

“We didn’t handle the pressure well,” Jones said. “I think they really watched film and saw that if they could get in our passing lanes in the half court that they would be effective as well and they were able to do that. So yeah, definitely it was on us. It wasn’t really anything that they were doing and I think that our level of intensity that we had in the Minnesota series, I think that level of intensity dropped a little bit and if we had that in Game 1, it would have been a different game.”