yeah just referring to dorion's comments about how it was the best transaction he's ever been a part of or something like that.
I am purely speculating by putting together what we know about the draft. But my guess would be that they had Brown in a tier above whoever they would have gotten if NJ took him at 11. As in, he would have been the last guy available from the tier they saw him in, and if NJ took him at 11, their 12th pick would severely drop in value.
We know they couldn't have had Brown absurdly high or anything because they tried to trade up to 8 to take Sergachev. There was also some (highly unconfirmed) talk earlier in the prospect thread that the Sens liked Dubois at 3 and could have gotten him for 12+Zibanejad. So if we think Logically they had Matthews+Laine up top (doesn't matter what order), then Dubois, the highest Sergachev could have been on their list would be 4, and the absolute highest Brown could have been would have been 5. A few teams apparently had Sergachev in their top 5, so we could have been one of them.
But Brown being ranked in our top 5 is sort of best case scenario. They probably had at least if not more than 1 or 2 other guys in there ahead of him considering guys like Tkachuk and Puljujarvi were ranked pretty highly among most teams. With Brown, my guess would be we traded up 1 spot to guarantee we got a guy who we maybe had ranked from 7-10 but more importantly was considered to be a big step up on whoever was left on our board at 12 if NJ took him.