By changing your "select name" to "Select-Object -Expand name" you now have an array of [string] objects instead of an array of [PSCustomObject] objects. If you want an empty string at the beginning of of the array named $groups you'd normally just insert one. However, PowerShell makes that a little harder to do than other languages because the [array] is of fixed length. If your array is short (which it probably is) and isn't being created a gazillion times (which it probably isn't) you can use the following bit of code (which looks unintuitive but it's one of the programming idioms peculiar to PowerShell) that adds a string of one space using array addition:
$groups = Get-ADGroup . . . | Select-Object . . .
$groups = ," " + $groups
There are other ways accomplishing the same result, so feel free to experiment. :-)