While it's hard to believe, there are entire fields where top journals can take 2 years to publish (no early publications, no culture of preprints, etc.) For example, in one subfield of EE where I once worked in mid oughts, the choice ws between an IEEE journal that took 2.5-4 yrs to publish or lesser known IET and online journals that published faster.

Such fields are few in 2017. But it's not implausible that in 2014 the only two quick forums in statistics he was aware of were Arxiv and lesser known journals.