With Briere's comment on why they didn't draft Zeev, I think this trade worked out exactly how Grier wanted it to. Briere saying that Zeev matched too much of what they already had makes me think they would have grabbed Dickinson if he was on the board.
So if we were to speculate that Buffalo takes Helenius at 11, Philly takes Dickinson at 12, and Minnesota takes Buium at 13, Sharks would have barely missed on that top tier of defensive prospects. A lot of us were probably okay reaching for Solberg at 14 or going with one of the higher tier forwards left but this was a great move to get a potential top pairing defenseman.
Looking at the board now, the alternative if they kept the 14th would've been something like MBN and Kleber/Hutson at 42. That's good but it doesn't fill the huge defensive hole we had as well as Dickinson does even if we go further and say the Sharks went with a defenseman like Badinka at 33 instead of Chernyshov.