ATLANTA — Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said he was “not too concerned” on Thursday afternoon. That even amid his team’s latest stumble, he still knows “we’ve got a good ballclub.”

Lately, however, plenty of other contenders have looked better than the two-time defending champions.

This week, that included the Atlanta Braves, who rode a complete-game shutout from Chris Sale on Thursday to a 1-0 victory that completed a three-game sweep.

“I wish we’d played better. I wish we’d have won the game. I wish we’d won the series. It didn’t happen,” Roberts said afterward. “But right now, there’s nothing we can do but just go out there and keep trying to get better and win a baseball game.”

Winning games, of course, has proven a difficult task for the Dodgers recently –– especially against the caliber of teams they are likely to see in the playoffs.

Since July 31, the Dodgers have played 15 games against opponents with winning records, and won just two of them.

The reason for such failures have varied, from late-game bullpen meltdowns to poorly timed defensive mishaps to consistently middling production from the offense –– which has been held to three runs or fewer in 10 of those 15 contests.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve been through a situation like this. Pretty sure it won’t be the last,” shortstop Mookie Betts said. “Just got to weather the storm. All we can really do is keep playing.”

That 2-13 record is a bit of a selective statistic, to be sure. In the nine other games the Dodgers have played against lesser teams in that stretch, they’ve gone a perfect 9-0.

However, this squad, with its $400 million payroll and star-studded rotation and grandiose aspirations of completing the first World Series three-peat by a National League team, will always be held to a different standard.

Beating bad teams, especially at this time of the year, will only inspire so much confidence.

As long as they struggle against quality opposition, their title hopes will feel somewhat tenuous.

“I’d still take us against any of those winning teams,” Roberts argued Thursday afternoon, writing off the club’s recent struggles as a temporary blip. “It just comes down to us having to play good baseball.”

As of Thursday night, it still hadn’t happened.

Instead, in a pitcher’s duel between Sale and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers turned in the kind of performance that could easily doom them come October.

Yamamoto was good in his outing, going 6 ⅓ innings with eight strikeouts, but allowed a home run on his first pitch –– a hanging splitter to Drake Baldwin –– that put the Dodgers in a quick hole.

But Sale, on the other hand, showcased complete domination, helping the Braves pull within one game of the Dodgers for a top-two NL playoff seed.

The veteran left-hander recorded 11 strikeouts, including one of Shohei Ohtani in the third inning that was punctuated with his first 100 mph fastball since 2018. He allowed only five hits and didn’t walk anyone, doing practically whatever he wanted in a 108-pitch steamrolling of the Dodgers’ scuffling offense.

“We didn’t have much of an answer today,” Betts, who accounted for two of the Dodgers’ hits, acknowledged.

Granted, Sale did pose a particularly formidable challenge, entering the night 12-9 with a 2.20 ERA.

But so will many of the arms the Dodgers face in the playoffs –– as have many of the ones they’ve seen during their recent winning-opponent failures.

That’s the trouble right now. The Dodgers are doing some things right. Their rotation continues to meet otherworldly expectations. And yet, it still hasn’t been enough to get on a roll.

“Like I said before, the series, regardless of how this series goes, it’s not a tell on what’s going to happen in the postseason,” Roberts insisted, while comparing this late August stretch of the season to the grueling “third leg of a mile.”

“But,” he added, “they’re a good ball club, and it’s a team that you know there’s a chance we’re going to see them again, and that’s the intensity that they’re going to bring. So we got to be ready for it.”

For now, in their latest setback against a fellow contender, the Dodgers once again weren’t.

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