Alexey-Marchenko-9-22-14

Red Wings defense prospect Alexei Marchenko slams in to the boards on top of Pittsburgh Penguins' Bobby Farnham during Monday's preseason game.

(The Associated Press)

TRAVERSE CITY – Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock said he was pleased with the goaltending, the power play and the performance of a couple of team's defense prospects during Monday's 2-1 preseason victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins at Consol Energy Center.

But he didn't like their breakouts.

"We couldn't execute at all on the breakout coming out of our zone," Babcock said. "We spent way too much time in our own zone; lack of talk, a lot of it is execution, but we'll get better at those things.

"It was good for guys to get a game under their belt. You can have training camp all you want, if you don't play it's hard, so getting a game was great."

The club's top four defense prospects all played: Xavier Ouellet (22:08), Ryan Sproul (21:45), Mattias Backman (19:08) and Alexey Marchenko (16:25).

"I thought Ouellet had a good night. I thought Sproul did some good things," Babcock said. "Marchy looked a bit like he hadn't played in a long time (since late February, when he injured his ankle), but he hadn't played in a long time so we expect it. And Backman's just getting used to things over here (played in his first NHL preseason game). I wanted to play them all so I could see them all together. It was good. They were fine."

Tomas Tatar and Pavel Datsyuk scored power-play goals.

"(The power play) was real good. I like the way (the goals) happened, too," Babcock said. "(New assistant coach) Jim Hiller has done a nice job there. It's a little bit different than we've ever done, so it's nice. We'll see if we can keep it going."

Jimmy Howard stopped 25-of-26 shots through two periods and Petr Mrazek turned aside all 10 shots he faced in the third.

Click here for updates on injuries to Datsyuk, Sproul and Darren Helm.

Click here for the Red Wings' lineup for tonight's preseason game in Chicago.

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